Frankenstein's mother

The story of the writing of Frankenstein is well-known, but maybe not correctly. Given how important the story is to our cultural myths, and how often it has been played out in theme and variation in books and movies and plays and the stories we tell our children to scare the wits out of them when we should be trying to put them to sleep, you'd think we'd know more about it. Quick! Was the author married to Shelley on that dark and stormy night when she conceived it?

Speaking of conception, that is one of the things the book is about, of course. But not necessarily humanity conceiving life and taking the role of God in the universe, but childbirth itself, plain and simple. Ruth Franklin, in making this case, writes:

Not only was Mary Shelley pregnant during much of the period that she was writing Frankenstein, but she had already suffered the birth and death of an infant. Unsurprisingly, she was tormented by the loss: A journal entry in 1815 reads, “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lives.” The echoes of Frankenstein—in which the scientist, who hopes to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” at last sees it open its eyes and breathe—are unmistakable. And the birth of the “creature,” as he calls it at first, occurs only after “days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue”; later he refers again to the “painful labor.”

There's more to it than that. Was ‘Frankenstein’ Really About Childbirth?