Not long ago, the traveller in England was confronted everywhere – on railway stations, in bookshops, on hoardings and placards – with a message advertising Penguin Classics: ‘Two Heads are Better than One’. The coarsely represented male face (high forehead, long hair, high collar) was juxtaposed with an equally blurred female one (lace collar, curls peeking out of cap). With the crudity of images reproduced, and reproduced again, these faces seemed to have not the idiosyncrasy of individuals but the replicability of trademarks. It was not the merging together of these two icons that signalled their equivalence, so much as their familiarity, the expectation broadcast so clearly that if there were two writers whose images the British railway-travelling, and bookshop-frequenting, public would be sure to recognise, these were they – William Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

The association of Shakespeare's and Austen's images and names might well be said to belong to the history of promotion rather than of critical history. If you were concerned, as many of Austen's nineteenth-century critics may well have been, that the object of your enthusiasm – her world so circumscribed, her range so narrow – met none of the heroic criteria for great writing, what better defence than the use of Shakespeare's name?