This book has drawn on eighteenth-century and contemporary philosophical accounts of human society, gender and Western psychogenesis. It has used gender as a form of fulcrum on which to move Austen's novels and their relationship to thinkers who formed the Zeitgeist of the late eighteenth century, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Millar and Mary Wollstonecraft. It has also explored the ways in which Austen's novels interact with more recent ideas that grew out of the tradition of the Enlightenment, such as those of Norbert Elias and feminist theorists.

When mapping the human psyche, Freud drew on the universalizable categories furthered by several Enlightenment philosophers. According to Goudsblom and Mennell, Elias found missing in Freud's account ‘a historical and sociological dimension to psychoanalysis’ that ‘necessitated a revision of some of its basic concepts and assumptions’. Elias sought to rework the essentialist, ahistorical assumptions underlying Freudian psychoanalysis by tracing the processual character of the psyche through the last six centuries of Western societies, thus giving an account of the rise of the civilized habitus. His work is indebted to the conjectural history of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially John Millar's The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), where the processual character of society is already stated in the second part of its title: An Inquiry in the Circumstances which Give Rise to Influence and Authority, in the Different Members of Society.