A playable classic · Jane Austen, 1817
Take the pen in Persuasion
An interactive classic with a fixed world, canon characters, and three authored first pages. You decide what the next paragraph does.
Can I play or write a Persuasion story with AI?
Yes. Underfiction lets you write from Anne Elliot’s position as Captain Wentworth returns after eight years, beginning at one of three authored moments and continuing in your own direction.
The world premise
It is autumn, and the family estate has been let. Your father — Sir Walter, a baronet with a fine mirror in every room and an account-book he declines to open — has spent his way out of his own house, and the lawyers' remedy is a tenant: Admiral Croft, lately of the war, a weather-browned, kindly man who walks the grounds as if they were a quarterdeck and makes no apology for it. Mrs. Croft walks them at his side — a weathered, sensible woman who has crossed the Atlantic four times in ships her husband commanded, and treats dry land as the lesser element. The family remove to Bath is decided. You are parked meanwhile at Uppercross with your married sister, who is always a little unwell when insufficiently attended, and the big cheerful Musgrove house across the lane, where the two daughters play at the harp and wait, visibly, for something to happen to them.
Something is going to happen to them. Admiral Croft's wife has a brother: a captain of the navy, home from eight years of war with a fortune in prize-money and a name the papers have printed more than once. Eight years ago that name belonged to a young commander with no fortune at all, and for one summer it was going to belong to you. You were nineteen. He was sure of himself the way the weather is sure, and you loved him entirely — and were persuaded out of it by the one voice you had never learned to refuse: an old family friend, wise, kind, certain that a girl of your prospects owed herself more than a penniless sailor's hopes. You gave him up for his own good, they said. He went to sea believing only that you had given him up. He is expected at Uppercross within the week.
The country round has its autumn machinery: long walks under hedgerows that hear more than the drawing rooms do; dinners where the pianoforte wants playing so that others may dance, and you play; shooting parties, sprained ankles, the navy talked of at every table. Later there will be Bath — the white crescents, the concert rooms, the card parties, your father restored to a setting worthy of his mirror — and in Bath there will also be your cousin, the heir to everything, lately grown attentive, whose manners are perfect and whose motives keep their own books. Lady Russell — the old friend, the kind voice, the author of your one great obedience — watches over you still, and would do it all again.
Your position
You enter beside the canon
You take Anne Elliot’s place: seven-and-twenty, useful to everyone, noticed by almost no one, and still listening for the name you have not spoken in eight years. The premise preserves the pressures that made her first choice — family rank, money, Lady Russell’s influence, Wentworth’s wounded pride — while giving you authority over the second. You decide what Anne says when politeness has carried silence far enough.
Canon characters in the story
Captain Frederick Wentworth
Two-and-thirty, brown from eight years of weather, and handsome in the finished, capable way of a man who has been obeyed at sea since five-and-twenty; five-and-twenty thousand pounds in prize-money, a post-captain's rank, and the easy decided manners of someone who made every shilling and knows exactly what the making cost. He fills a drawing room without trying: quick, warm, full of stories he tells well and opinions he delivers like orders cheerfully given. The warmth is real — and it is also aimed. Eight years ago, in this very county, he was refused by the one person whose judgment he could not laugh off, on the advice of prudent friends, for the crime of having only himself to offer; and he has come home rich, proved right, and precisely as angry as the day he left, which he would deny with total sincerity. He believes he is over it. He believes he is shopping, agreeably, for a wife — anyone sweet-tempered and firm-minded will do, he says, and says it where it will be overheard. What he actually does is navigate by the one fixed point in the room while refusing to look at it: attentive to everyone else, punishingly courteous to *you*, resentment standing duty for a feeling he will not name because it never once went off watch. He is constant the way iron is constant; and if the armour ever fails, it will fail completely — in writing before speech.
Three authored openings
These are written first pages, not generated prompts. Each begins at a different pressure point in the book.
- 01
Eight Years
You gave him up because wise people told you to. He just walked back into the room, rich, famous, and perfectly polite.
With Captain Frederick Wentworth
- 02
The Octagon Room
He came tonight to say something. Your cousin got there first — and now he is three steps from the door.
With Captain Frederick Wentworth
- 03
Half Agony, Half Hope
He overheard every word you said about constancy. He wrote while you spoke. The letter is in your hands.
With Captain Frederick Wentworth
From the first opening
A real prose excerpt
The first page is written. The next move is yours.
Begin with Eight Years. Continue in prose, redirect the scene, or overturn the premise entirely.
Take the pen