MARY Shelley published Frankenstein 200 years ago this month, in January, 1818.

The author is buried in Dorset with her parents and a talk about her can be heard at the Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis on January 25 when Fiona Sampson talks about her new book In Search of Mary Shelley, which was Radio 4's book of the week.

Frankenstein, conceived during a famously windy and rainy summer in Switzerland, grew out of Mary Shelley's teenage affair with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley was born in 1797, the daughter of the feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin.

She began her romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a married man, in 1814, and travelled Europe with him, becoming pregnant with his child.

Returning to England, the couple were ostracised, and Mary lost the baby she was carrying. They married in 1816 after the suicide of Shelley’s first wife.

The Shelleys spent that summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont near Geneva. Byron had the idea that they should each write a ghost story and Mary recalled a “waking dream” about a man creating a living creature.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, grew from a short story into a novel, and was initially published without an author’s name. Despite several negative reviews – one calling it a “horrible and disgusting absurdity” – it became a big popular success. Mary saw the first theatrical production in 1823.

But Mary’s life was marked by tragedy. The couple left England for Italy in 1818 and lost two more children before Percy Florence was born in 1819. Percy Bysshe drowned in 1822 and Mary returned to England with their son.

In 1849, Sir Percy Florence Shelley bought Boscombe Cottage, which had been built in 1801. He intended to turn it into a home for his mother.

However, Mary died from a brain tumour in 1851.

Mary wanted to be buried with her parents, so Percy had their coffins exhumed and interred in a family plot at St Peter’s Church in Bournemouth.

Sir Percy and his wife liked the house they had bought and decided to make it their home. Extensively rebuilt, the manor boasted a 200-seat theatre where the couple staged plays to pay for medical services.

The Shelley home in Boscombe became Groveley Manor School in 1911 and was sold to Bournemouth council in 1936 to become a technical college.

It later housed the Shelley Rooms collection of artefacts, closed in 2001 as a cost-cutting measure.

After a lengthy dispute over who owned it, Bournemouth council sold the site to Charles Higgins Primary Care in 2005. The developer created a medical centre but also restored the theatre for public use.

In 2011, the theatre hosted its first public performance for 110 years.

Appropriately, the play was Frankenstein: The Year Without a Summer, about the night Frankenstein was created.