For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft. For the redraft, I asked it to rework an incoherent description of what the Dashwoods’ mother was doing with her hands during the cart ride, and have Marianne show more emotion. My instinct is that free women of color in this time and place would not have survived long, if they showed the overwrought behavior that Marianne and her mother do in the Austen novel. But Marianne isn’t Marianne if she isn’t the most emo person in any given room. Then I realized this was the right time to introduce Edward, and that led to two more drafts. I manually removed an em-dash rather than ask for another draft.

Journey to Faubourg Marigny

For the origins of this project, see previous posts in “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude’s first draft was fairly satisfactory on this one, and draft two was me asking for em-dash removal and sentence level fixes in a few places where the AI’s lack of logic became obvious. The words “with her [Frances’s] advice” are mine. I didn’t like what Claude had there but couldn’t justify mucking around with a third draft for it.

Planning the Departure

For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude, amazingly, got through draft 1 with no em-dashes! I asked for a rephrase of one sentence that felt anachronistic to me, and to break down a loooong sentence that ended this scene in draft 1. Otherwise draft 2, which you see here, is much what draft 1 was. I did realize at the last minute that this needed to come before the first Marianne POV, even though the latter was written first, and adjusted the scheduling accordingly. I haven’t had much reason to quarrel with these early setup scenes, but we will see how Claude does once the romance arcs start.

Letter from Mrs. Jennings