FRANKENSTEIN is a literary masterpiece that today is globally famous as a source of two of our most enduring archetypes, the obsessive scientist and the almost-human he creates.

To tie in with the bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein, the Wordsworth Trust is shifting the focus from the story to the teenager who wrote the monumental piece of literature - Mary Shelley.

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl who wrote Frankenstein runs at the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, until August 27.

The exhibition, supported by Roehampton University, London, is curated by prizewinning poet and writer Fiona Sampson to coincide with her recent biography In Search of Mary Shelley.

Fiona sifted through letters, diaries and records to discover the real woman behind the story, uncovering a complex, generous character trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly.

Mary was only 18 when, during a storm in June 1816, she competed with Shelley, Byron and John Polidori, Byron’s physician, to write a supernatural tale. The creative result was her novel Frankenstein.

Daughter of philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary was brought up by her father (her mother died days after her birth), in a household of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day: a world of political passion, scientific curiosity and radical new thought.

When she was 16, Mary eloped with Romantic Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe. She coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever.

As well as objects and artwork from the trust's collection and on loan - including the hotel register page that shows a scandalous inscription by Percy Shelley during the Alpine tour with Mary Shelley and Lord Byron in 1816 - the Grasmere exhibition includes the Wordsworth Trust's first edition of Frankenstein.

For further information telephone 015394-35544.