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Gorer terms the theme of four of Jane Austen's novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma—'Jane Austen's myth'. All four are about 'young women (Marianne, Elizabeth, Fanny, Emma) who are made love to by, but finally reject, the Charming but Worthless lover (Willoughby, Wickham, Crawford, Frank Churchill) and finally marry a man whom they esteem and admire rather than love passionately (Colonel Brandon, Darcy, Edmund Bertram, Mr. Knightley)'. All this to the tune of a ferocious debunking of passionate or sexual love.
Gorer thinks that the central theme in the four novels, which were written in five consecutive years, may be compared with the manifest content of a dream, while its elaboration into the novels corresponds to the analytic interpretation of a dream. He shows that mother hate, sister attachment and father fixation gradually develop in the first four novels until, in Persuasion, which appeared the year after Emma had been written, the mother, although still the cause of the heroine's troubles, is treated very leniently. The heroine then marries her lover while the father is pictured as vain, proud, stupid and selfish, and the sister is hated.
Gorer concludes:
It seems as though, by thus reworking her fantasies, Jane Austen had finally uncovered for herself the hidden motives behind the too warm, too