It was one of those utterances that was always going to put my back up. It’s up there with the most provocative and pompous of all pedantry.

“Frankenstein was the name of the Doctor, the creator not the monster. That’s why the monster is referred to as “Frankenstein’s Monster.”

It seems rather fitting that, having celebrated International Women’s Day, that we continue to celebrate the peerless genius of Mary Shelley two hundred years after the publication of her novel - one of the most enduring and influential of the English language.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Frankenstein. The image of the “created” monster is burnt into my mind, so iconic and memorable for my generation as it has been for every generation since 1818.

It’s difficult to believe that Shelley imagined and realised this magnum opus which still holds sway over us at the tender age of eighteen. (At eighteen I was wearing elephant cord trousers thinking that I was uber-hip while trying to make my beard look less like I was the member of a fundamentalist religious group). Two years later it was published but, given the power of the patriarchy at the time, the novel did not carry her name - an anonymously written book was taken more seriously than one penned by a woman. Perish the thought.

Regarded by some as one of the earliest examples of science fiction, the influence of Shelley’s creation is beyond breathtaking. There are literally innumerable film and TV adaptations - the first film adaptation came in the silent era in 1910 and popular culture has ever since remained fascinated by the monster and the man. Hammer Films alone produced a series of seven movies, featuring greats like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as well as Dave Prowse aka Darth Vader aka The Green Cross Code Man. Even Abbott and Costello “met” Frankenstein finding slapstick comedy in gothic horror.

There is almost always a new adaptation of a version of Frankenstein being developed in Hollywood - recent Oscar winning director Guillermo del Toro has been linked to one such adaptation with talk of Javier Bardem as the Monster. Del Toro describes the book as "the quintessential teenage book" that tells of how it feels when "you don't belong. You were brought to this world by people that don't care for you [then] you are thrown into a world of pain and suffering, and tears and hunger. It's an amazing book written by a teenage girl. It's mind-blowing”.

From pop novelty hit “Monster Mash” to The Royal National Theatre’s critically acclaimed stage version, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and our own Jonny Lee Miller, and comic books to Mel Brook’s comic masterpiece 'Young Frankenstein', I struggle to think of another piece of literature that has spawned so many spin offs over such an extended period of time. There is even a 'Frankenstein Complex', a term coined by the visionary Isaac Asimov - the complex explains humankind’s phobia of robots, of human-created forms of life.

The book can still get in the news today. Just this week the Sun newspaper ran the headline 'Flakensteins' over a story claiming 'snowflake' students felt sorry for the Creature. The story was in response to Professor Nick Groom’s introduction to a 200th anniversary edition of the book.

“When I teach the book now," he wrote, "students are very sentimental towards the being. But he is a mass murderer. It’s a familiar story isn’t it, someone with a terrible upbringing going on to commit terrible crimes. The monster does deserve sympathy.” Which sort of proves that rather than Millennials being too soft and soppy, Sun journalists have missed the entire point of the novel.

I can’t help but reflect on what the world might have looked like had Mary Shelley not had the tenacity and the wherewithal to get her book published. A hundred years before securing the vote one can only imagine the frustration felt by so many women, desperate to share their profound talent, their timeless vision; legions of women who through the ages were unable to have their voices heard.

At the time of publication, The British Critic, a quarterly review magazine, had this to say about the novel: "The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment."

Pretty damning, based solely on the gender rather than the output of the writer. While we experience a groundswell of change, some semblance of a shift towards a genuine realignment of equality in our world, there’s no better time to celebrate the genius of the overlooked half of our population.