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Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” famously conceived during a waking dream in the stormy summer of 1816, has inspired countless plays, movies, comic books, even iPhone apps. And now, the original manuscript is also the centerpiece of the first phase of the online Shelley-Godwin Archive, an ambitious digital project that goes live on Halloween.

The archive, whose opening will be celebrated at a public event on Thursday evening at the New York Public Library, is a collaboration between the library and the University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology in the Humanities, with contributions from Oxford’s Bodleian Library and several other institutions. Its goal is to eventually bring together all the known literary manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, his second wife, as well as Mary’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin — the “first family of English literature,” as the archive puts it.

The “Frankenstein” manuscript, owned by the Bodleian, is itself a sort of patched-together monster, according to Neil Fraistat, the director of the Maryland center and one of the project’s leaders. It survives mainly in two notebooks written by Mary, with editorial changes and comments made in Percy’s hand. On the site, users can hit a button to view only those words written by Mary or Percy. They can also view the surviving portions of the fair copy, written mostly in Mary’s hand, which was circulated to publishers.

Over the course of their relationship, Mr. Fraistat said, Percy and Mary’s handwriting grew to look very similar, helping give rise to debates about who was responsible for what. In “The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein,” published in 2007, John Lauritsen went so far as to argue that Percy was the novel’s true author, with Mary, who was still a teenager at the time, serving only as a copyist, as she had with much of his literary output. (The critic Germaine Greer went perhaps even further, arguing that “Frankenstein” was too bad a novel to have been written by Percy.)

The digital archive, Mr. Fraistat said, will give scholars and ordinary readers alike a direct window onto the Shelleys’ literary collaboration. In particular, he pointed to two places in the manuscript where Percy drops his neutral editorial stance and addresses his wife intimately. In one, he corrects her spelling of “enigmatic,” then addresses her using a favorite nickname: “Oh you pretty pecksie!” (Mary, elsewhere, called her husband “Elf.”)

“It’s one of those moments that makes you step back and recover the freshness of their collaboration,” Mr. Fraistat said, adding: “You won’t see that in the printed edition of ‘Frankenstein.’”

The next planned phase of the online archive, which is supported by a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will add manuscripts for Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” to be followed by more pages from Shelley’s nearly 30 known notebooks and other manuscripts, some of which, Mr. Fraistat said, reveal Mary Shelley’s influence on her husband’s work.

“This was a two-way collaboration,” he said. “This wasn’t just about him supervising her.”

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