Can AI Write Like Austen, Doyle & Shelley? 3 Books × 3 Models

In this article 11 sections

We ran a hands-on style-imitation test on the English homepage of Maliang Writer across Chapter 1 of three public-domain classics: Gemini 4 Carbon wrote all three in English, producing the longest chapters at the slowest pace; Claude Sonnet 5.5 wrote all three in English and finished the fastest; DeepSeek V4.1 Flash wrote two of the three in Chinese, showing that authors still need to keep an eye on the manuscript's language even on an English interface. None of the nine chapters produced long verbatim overlaps with the original books.

Key Takeaways

• Narrative techniques carry over while the stories are built from scratch: All three models broke down and borrowed craft techniques from the source books—such as Austen-style ironic maxims and gossip-driven dialogue, Conan Doyle's sidekick observer POV, and Mary Shelley's epistolary framing or retrospective first-person confession—then swapped in brand-new characters and cases.
• Using the English page doesn't automatically lock the manuscript into English: Gemini 4 Carbon and Claude Sonnet 5.5 turned in English chapters all three times; DeepSeek V4.1 Flash wrote only Frankenstein in English (while still giving the book a Chinese title meaning Letters from the Ice), and wrote the other two in Chinese.
• Speed and chapter length vary sharply: Claude Sonnet 5.5 finished under 4 minutes every time, delivering 857 to 1,833 words per chapter; Gemini 4 Carbon took 13 to 14.5 minutes per run, producing 2,271 to 4,342 words per chapter.
• Credit usage spans more than fivefold: Across the 9 test runs, the lowest chapter cost 44.05 credits (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) and the highest cost 253.1 credits (Gemini 4 Carbon), showing wide gaps across models and chapter lengths.
• No verbatim copying from the classics: Comparing all 9 generated chapters against roughly the opening 12,000 characters of each original book yielded 0 identical substrings of 24 characters or more, and the longest identical word sequences were just 3 to 5 everyday words.

How We Tested

We ran the tests using "AI Imitation" on the English homepage of Maliang Writer, pulling from the Project Gutenberg public-domain library. The three source books were Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Book #1342), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Book #1661), and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Book #84).

The models tested were Gemini 4 Carbon, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 5.5. In each run, we sent a single-sentence prompt in English asking the model to write an original passage modeled on the target classic's prose style without copying the source text, making its own creative changes.

After each run, we checked the backend logs to verify that both the chat model and the prose-drafting model matched the model under test. Notably, when writing Pride and Prejudice, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Claude Sonnet 5.5 wrote directly into the chapter without invoking a separate writer sub-agent; during DeepSeek V4.1 Flash's run on The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, an earlier attempt only output a passage in English inside the chat window without saving a chapter, so we reran that test.

To check overlap, we compared each generated Chapter 1 against roughly the first 12,000 characters of the corresponding original classic, measuring near-duplicate sentence/passage pairs, identical substrings of 24 characters or longer, and the longest identical word sequence. Since we tested just 1 chapter per book per model, this is a small-sample hands-on snapshot.

How the Original Classics Open

First, here are the opening lines of the three source texts on Project Gutenberg.

Pride and Prejudice (Book #1342) opens with an ironic maxim spotlighting how neighborhood families view a wealthy bachelor:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Book #1661) opens with "A Scandal in Bohemia," narrated in the first person by Dr. Watson looking back on the singular place one woman held in Sherlock Holmes's mind:

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

Frankenstein (Book #84) opens with the first letter sent from St. Petersburgh to the narrator's sister, Mrs. Saville, assuring her of his safety and his confidence in his northern expedition:

Letter 1 To Mrs. Saville, England. St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

Pride and Prejudice: Wry Maxims and Neighborhood Gossip

Gemini 4 Carbon

Book title: An Unforgiving Fortune; chapter title: Chapter 1 A Fortune Out of Hand. 2,526 English words, 792 seconds, 229.03 credits. Opening lines:

In the polite parishes of Gloucestershire, a gentleman who married to repair an encumbered estate was universally commended for his prudence, whereas a young widow who possessed six thousand pounds a year, without a husband to assist her in spending it, was regarded by every neighbouring family as a public irregularity crying out for immediate masculine correction.

The agent noted that it set the story in Gloucestershire by default, following wealthy widow Helena as she deflects a scheming cousin before Mrs. Trenchard calls—completely uninterested in local bachelors and strictly there to negotiate a millstream lease with the canal company. It also ran an overlap check against the first 3 chapters of the original and standardized Regency British spelling. Objectively, it borrowed the original's aphoristic opening structure, flipping the wealthy bachelor's predicament into the perceived social anomaly of a rich young widow in the eyes of the neighborhood.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

Book title: "Untitled Book" (in Chinese); chapter title: Chapter 1: The Blueprints (in Chinese). The chapter was written in Chinese: 1,376 Chinese characters, 134 seconds, 44.05 credits. Opening lines:

The first letter arrived on Tuesday afternoon. It stated that the newly completed concert hall at the end of Longbridge Street would, before the month was out, invite the town's respectable families to attend its inaugural performance. (translated from Chinese)

The agent explained that it unpacked the logic of the first 3 source chapters—sparking dialogue from fresh news, measuring social standing in numbers, and driving action through rumor—adapting it into a dispute between a mother and daughters of the Meng family over concert hall invitations and "spending a hundred taels of silver on six chairs," while fixing an inconsistency in the number of invitations during self-review. Objectively, even though it didn't write in English, the dinner-table exchange where the wife presses her husband about the invitations and he replies curtly that he knows nothing mirrors the opening banter between Mr. Bennet and his wife over neighborhood news.

Claude Sonnet 5.5

Book title: "Untitled Book" (in Chinese); chapter title: Chapter I. 857 English words, 106 seconds, 97.13 credits. Opening lines:

It is a circumstance well known in the county of Wexcombe, and not often disputed, that a house which has stood empty above a twelvemonth must be supposed to labour under some defect of character; and that the first person who consents to live in it can never be acquitted of having a motive.

The agent noted that it modeled the barbed aphoristic opening, balanced multi-clause narrator judgments, and pointed conversational wit, then ran a verbatim check against Chapter 1 of the source text. Objectively, it used a dry, maxim-style opening and shifted the neighborhood's object of speculation from a newly arrived bachelor to an old house finally leased after standing empty for fourteen months.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Sidekick POV and Deductive Detail

Gemini 4 Carbon

Book title: The Arundel Lane Inquiries; chapter title: Chapter 1 The Case of the Second Chronometer. 4,342 English words, 794 seconds, 239.67 credits. Opening lines:

On a raw November evening, when the yellow fog from the Thames lay so thick along the Strand that the link-boys seemed to wade through tallow rather than air, I turned down the narrow cobbles of Arundel Lane with Julian Rooke’s achromatic lens buttoned safely inside my muff.

The agent noted that in this chapter Julian Rooke exposes a client who forged a pocket chronometer and staged its theft, deducing the truth from latch filings, jeweler's rouge under a thumb, and a belladonna-dilated right pupil; afterward, it ran an overlap check and cleaned up 12 spacing, article, and formatting slips. Objectively, it adopted a Watson-like first-person observer POV, following the narrator through thick Thames fog to visit Julian Rooke, a friend living alone after being dismissed from the Royal Mint.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

Book title: Blind Witness of Silver Salt Street (in Chinese); chapter title: Chapter 1: Seven Stopped Clocks (in Chinese). The chapter was likewise written in Chinese: 3,116 Chinese characters, 386 seconds, 93.6 credits. Opening lines:

Morning, the ninth day of the seventh month, Year 17 of the Republic. Dog days of summer in Anping County—so scorching hot that not a single dog on the street let out a bark. (translated from Chinese)

The agent explained that it drew craft lessons from "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Red-Headed League"—first-person bystander recollection, stating conclusions before laying out observations, crisp declarative Q&A exchanges, and treating physical details as evidence—while building an overall outline, character sheets, and foreshadowing notes, then running overlap checks in three batches. Objectively, although it transplanted the setting to a Republican-era county apothecary, the dynamic of an apothecary clerk assisting his blind coroner "senior brother" maps cleanly onto the Watson-and-Holmes partnership structure.

Claude Sonnet 5.5

Book title: "Untitled Book" (in Chinese); chapter title: The Adventure of the Wandering F-Sharp. 1,833 English words, 237 seconds, 200.91 credits. Opening lines:

To me Miss Honoria Quill has always been the one person of my acquaintance whom it was impossible to describe without seeming to slander her, and equally impossible to praise without flattering what she would have called a mere instrument. She was by trade a tuner of pianofortes, and by temperament something a good deal less convenient.

The agent noted that because both the prompt and the reference classic were in English, it wrote in English; it emulated the paragraph-long character appraisal, multi-clause sentences with semicolons, and bold deductions unpacked via Q&A, deliberately steering clear of signature source tropes like counting steps, shoe scrapes, or iodoform smells in favor of a female piano tuner who solves mysteries by ear. Objectively, the opening line "To me Miss Honoria Quill has always been..." echoes Conan Doyle's opening syntax, using a full analytical paragraph to establish the detective's trade and temperament.

Frankenstein: Epistolary Confession and Gothic Suspense

Gemini 4 Carbon

Book title: The Glass-Maker of Blackmere; chapter title: Chapter 1 The Reliquary of Breath. 2,271 English words, 871 seconds, 253.1 credits. Opening with the dateline "Dartmoor, November 14th, 17—" and a plea for his friend to burn his old letters, the text continues:

My fingers tremble so violently upon this damp sheet that I can scarce govern the quill, yet I dare not lay it down until I have extorted from your friendship a solemn promise: never, under any inducement of curiosity or compassion, set your foot upon the headland of Blackmere Crag, nor suffer any living hand to force the bolted oak of my cliffside chapel.

The agent explained that the chapter depicts an invisible acoustic consciousness awakened inside glass vessels that halts its creator's hammer by resonating with his skull and breastbone, using his heartbeat as a bellows, and closes with a water glass in a Dartmoor inn ringing in time with his pulse; after drafting, it ran overlap checks against Letter 1, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 of the original. Objectively, it kept the 17— epistolary date convention while inverting Shelley's hopeful departure letter into a panicked warning written from a sleet-swept inn after an experiment spirals out of control.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

Book title: Letters from the Ice (written in Chinese); chapter title: Letter 1. The chapter itself was written in English: 1,875 words, 464 seconds, 62.53 credits. Opening lines:

To my sister Margaret, from the northern ice, greeting.
I write to you from a place where the ink freezes in the well if I do not keep the lamp close, and where the only sounds are the grinding of the floes against the hull and the low talk of men who have nothing left to say to one another.

The agent explained that it cast Irish ship's surgeon Ellis Vane writing to his sister aboard a whaler trapped in pack ice, drawing on Shelley's self-justifying outer-frame letters, long sentences structured with semicolons and dashes, and grounding physical objects before emotion; when its overlap check flagged the sign-off "Your affectionate brother," as matching standard epistolary phrasing, it proactively rewrote the closing. Objectively, it likewise adopted the epistolary frame of writing home to a sister from the northern ice before introducing the mystery of a wooden crate out on the floes.

Claude Sonnet 5.5

Book title: The Tide-Glass; chapter title: Chapter 1. 1,229 English words, 227 seconds, 165.58 credits. Opening lines:

I am the son of Josiah Thorne, harbour-reeve of a small and unregarded port upon the eastern marshes of England. I begin with him, not from filial vanity, but because I cannot give any account of myself without first accounting for the man whose silences made me. Our family was neither high nor low.

The agent noted that it read Letter 1, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2, borrowing the retrospective first-person family history of Shelley's Chapter 1, long sentences linked by semicolons and dashes, and eighteenth-century literary diction casting the sea as a sublime, dreadful force; when the draft came in shy of its 1,400-word target, it left the prose lean rather than padding it out. Objectively, it modeled the family-background opening of the main narrative's first chapter, planting its hook at the end of the chapter with an old ledger predicting the exact minute of the flood tide.

Results at a Glance

Here is the full breakdown across all 9 runs (3 classics × 3 models):

Did Any Text Overlap with the Originals?

Comparing all 9 generated chapters against roughly the opening 12,000 characters of their respective source books gave a clear result: across all 9 chapters, there were 0 identical substrings of 24 characters or longer.

The two Chinese chapters naturally had 0 English word matches; across the remaining 7 English chapters, the longest identical word sequences were only 3 to 5 everyday words—such as the 5-word stock phrase "be in want of a"—rather than lifted sentences.

Under Pride and Prejudice, Gemini 4 Carbon and Claude Sonnet 5.5 each triggered 2 "near-verbatim passage pairs" (all other 7 chapters had 0). Inspecting the match log showed that all 4 hits came from an ultra-short fragment in the original text consisting solely of "the neighbourhood." appearing inside newly written long sentences—a false positive caused by containment scoring on a two-word fragment, not copying.

Backend logs also show that in most runs the agent ran verbatim overlap checks against the reference chapters on its own; when writing its English letter, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash even swapped out "Your affectionate brother," after flagging the standard epistolary sign-off during self-check.

Tips for Imitating Classic English Style with AI

1. State in your prompt that the body text should be in English: Even when prompted in English on the English homepage, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash still wrote two chapters in Chinese and paired one English chapter with a Chinese book title. Try stating directly in English that both the manuscript body and book title should be in English (we didn't test adding that instruction in this round).
2. Generate Chapter 1 first to check language and voice: Single-chapter output ranged from 857 words to 4,342 words across models, with very different pacing. Draft a single chapter first to make sure the language, POV, and sentence rhythm match what you want before continuing.
3. Run overlap checks chapter by chapter: When reference texts exceeded the single-pass check limit during these runs, the agent split checks into batches by passage or chapter; if you see a "similar passage" alert, inspect the match details first to see whether it merely caught an ultra-short phrase or standard letter salutation—for a step-by-step walkthrough, see Does AI Style Imitation Copy the Source Text? Verbatim Check Tests & Troubleshooting.
4. Use public-domain classics freely for side-by-side reference, and don't paste lines from copyrighted books: Public-domain works on Project Gutenberg are free to use and safe to compare directly against source text; if you're taking inspiration from a copyrighted book, avoid pasting original sentences into your prompt.

FAQ

Q1: Can AI imitate Jane Austen's prose style?

Based on this hands-on test, AI can borrow signature techniques from Pride and Prejudice—such as barbed aphoristic openings, balanced multi-clause narrator commentary on characters, and family banter sparked by neighborhood gossip. However, 1 of the 3 models in our test wrote the chapter as a Chinese novel of manners instead; if you want English prose, try specifying English output directly in your prompt and double-check the language after Chapter 1.

Q2: Which model works better for English style imitation?

We aren't ranking the models here, as each behaved quite differently. Gemini 4 Carbon wrote all three chapters in English, delivering the highest word counts while taking the longest time. Claude Sonnet 5.5 wrote all three in English in the shortest time, turning in 857 to 1,833 words per chapter. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash used fewer credits, though two of its three chapters came out in Chinese, so you have to keep a close eye on the output language.

Q3: Why did the English page produce Chinese chapters?

When we sent English prompts from the English homepage, Gemini 4 Carbon and Claude Sonnet 5.5 wrote entirely in English, whereas DeepSeek V4.1 Flash wrote two chapters in Chinese and gave its one English chapter a Chinese book title. When you need an English draft, try stating explicitly in your prompt to write the body text in English (we didn't test that extra instruction in this round) and verify the language right after Chapter 1 finishes.

Q4: Does imitating public-domain classics infringe copyright?

This post shares our hands-on test logs only and does not constitute legal advice. Public-domain works hosted on Project Gutenberg are free to use. Across all 9 test runs here, the models borrowed narrative POV and sentence-level craft while inventing new characters, settings, and plots, producing original prose with no long verbatim overlap with the source texts. If copyrighted works are involved, consider consulting a qualified legal professional.

Q5: How many credits and how much time does one chapter take?

Across our 9 test runs, the fastest chapter finished in 106 seconds and the slowest took 871 seconds (about 14.5 minutes); the lowest credit cost for a chapter was 44.05 credits and the highest was 253.1 credits. Claude Sonnet 5.5 finished all three chapters in under 4 minutes each, while Gemini 4 Carbon took 13 to 14.5 minutes per chapter. Try generating Chapter 1 first to gauge actual time and credit usage for your setup.

Q6: How can I check whether a draft copied the source text?

Try running a chapter-by-chapter verbatim comparison between your generated chapter and the source book to check for long identical character strings and similar passage pairs. In most runs here, the agent checked its draft against the reference chapters automatically; you can also run your own comparison afterward, and if a "similar passage" flag pops up, open the match details first to rule out harmless hits on ultra-short phrases or standard letter sign-offs like the ones we saw.

Wrapping Up

Across these 9 test chapters, all three models borrowed opening gambits, narrative POVs, or sentence structures from the classics to tell brand-new stories without lifting whole passages from the source texts—though authors still need to watch the manuscript language even when working on an English interface. If you want to test-drive classic public-domain voices for your next story, head over to Maliang Writer's AI Style Imitation page to try it out.

Related Reading:

• Does AI Style Imitation Copy the Source Text? Verbatim Check Tests & Troubleshooting
• Testing 6 Models with the Exact Same Prompt: Web-Novel Opening Showdown
• Hands-On with Gemini 4 Carbon for Web Novels: Speed, Word Count & Pros and Cons
• Maliang Writer: AI Style Imitation Feature Overview