By Mary Shelley
It’s hard to believe that the story of Frankenstein and his immortal monster was conjured up in the mind of an 18-year-old girl, but the extraordinarily gifted London-born novelist, Mary Wollstonecraft was no ordinary teenager. In 1816, the author spent a summer in Villa
Diodati on Lake Geneva, with her step-sister Claire, Mary’s soon-to-behusband, Percy Shelley, and their friends Lord Byron and John William
Polidori. During some unseasonable rainy weather Byron suggested that they each attempt to write ghost stories to read around the fire by night.
However, when Mary put pen to paper, she didn’t just write a creepy story, she created a monster! Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, was published two years later, becoming a world famous masterpiece as well as a stunning early example of the science fiction novel.
But, although the terrifying story of Victor Frankenstein and his unstoppable creation was born by the lake side in Switzerland, the seeds for the creepy story were actually sown on the shores of Scotland. In 1812, just four years before she wrote the Gothic novel, Mary was living in Dundee with the Baxter family at their home in South Baffin Street.
The young girl was said to be staying with the family friends so that she could treat her eczema with regular, bracing, salt-water sea baths.
The 14-year-old girl found the beautiful but eerie water there fascinating. Years later, when Frankenstein was published for a second time, Mary included this love letter to the River Tay in the novel’s foreword:
“I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then – but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.”