“I have no doubt of seeing the animal today,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote hastily to her husband, William Godwin, on August 30, 1797, as she waited for the midwife who would help her deliver the couple’s first child. The “animal” was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein, one of the most enduring and influential novels of the nineteenth century. But Wollstonecraft would not live to see her daughter’s fame: She died of an infection days after giving birth.

The last notes that Wollstonecraft wrote to Godwin are included in the exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” which began last year at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and has now come to the New York Public Library. On display are numerous artifacts both personal and literary from the lives of the Shelleys, including manuscript pages from the notebook in which Mary wrote Frankenstein (with editing in the margins by her husband), which have never before been shown publicly in the United States. But it was Wollstonecraft’s scribbled note, in which she referred to her baby as “the animal”— the same word that the scientist in Frankenstein would use to describe his own notorious creation—that gave me pause. Could the novel—commonly understood as a fable of masculine reproduction, in which a man creates life asexually—also be a story about pregnancy?

Frankenstein is one of the great creation myths of all time: a scientist, drunk on knowledge and possibility, discovers the secret of animating matter and energizes a monstrous creature, which proceeds to wreak havoc on his life and that of everyone he loves. Perhaps inevitably, the novel has engendered its own creation myth, one that is nearly as uncanny as the tale of the monster itself. As Mary Shelley tells the story in her introduction to an 1831 reprint edition of the novel, she began writing it during a trip to Geneva in the summer of 1816, when she was only 18. The weather was wet, and the group—which included Mary, Percy (who was still married to his first wife, Harriet), and Lord Byron—passed the time by reading an old volume of ghost stories. After Byron proposed that each of them should write his or her own ghost story, Mary dreamed one night of a “hideous phantasm of a man stretched out .… On the working of some powerful engine, [it shows] signs of life, and stir[s] with an uneasy, half vital motion.” The story followed quickly: She started it in June 1816 and finished it by May of the following year.

Most critics have understood Frankenstein as a cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in intellectual hubris: the Tower of Babel reworked as science fiction. “We need look no further than the novel’s subtitle—The Modern Prometheus—to discover Frankenstein’s main theme: the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities,” Maurice Hindle writes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. During the trip to Geneva, Byron and Percy Shelley were obsessed with new developments in natural philosophy, including the experiments of Erasmus Darwin with “galvanism”—the use of electrical current to stimulate inanimate objects. Mary had been listening to their discussions with great interest. Her father, a distinguished philosopher in his own right, had introduced her as a child to some of the great minds of the time, and she read widely in English literature and philosophy, including Milton’s Paradise Lost and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding—both foundational texts for Frankenstein.

Even considering Mary Shelley’s extraordinary education, though, there is something that does not quite fit together in this origin theory. As Miranda Seymour, author of a recent biography, has written, Shelley’s conception of an “ambitious young scientist who … became the first creator of a living human being without divine assistance [was] a shocking idea in her day and an extraordinary one for a young woman to choose for her first subject.” Mary admitted as much herself. “How [did] I, then a young girl, [come] to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” she wondered in 1831, in an introduction to a reprint edition of the now-seminal novel.