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Virginia Woolf said she would take matters into her own hands. The year was 1932, seven years past the positive critical reception for Mrs. Dalloway. In a review of her latest book of essays on English literature, The Second Common Reader, Woolf’s contemporary J. B. Priestley had called her work the product of “terrifically sensitive, cultured, invalidish ladies with private means.” Put another way: pretentious.
Literary fisticuffs ensued, between Priestley and Harold Nicolson, another writer in Woolf’s orbit. Were those who favored only what they deemed “highbrow” just fusty gatekeepers, as Priestley had argued? Were “lowbrow” texts—serialized stories, pulp fiction, tabloids—nothing more than money grabs for the masses? The BBC invited the two to give dueling addresses on the radio. By that point, Woolf was seething. “The Battle of the Brows troubles, I am told, the evening air,” she wrote in a letter she intended to send to the New Statesman and Nation (which had already been an outlet for her ire against another male critic). “May I take this opportunity to express my opinion and at the same time draw attention to certain aspects of the question which seem to me to have been unfortunately overlooked?”
Firstly, Woolf declared, being highbrow is the best. She was unabashed in her preferences: The highbrow “is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. That is why I have always been so proud to be called highbrow. That is why, if I could be more of a highbrow I would.” She went on to cite some of her highbrow idols—Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen—before affirming that being named among them was “of course beyond the wildest dreams of my imagination.”
As for the highbrow’s opposite, the lowbrow, she felt the two camps existed in happy mutualism:
You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them—to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them.
Hers was one prominent opinion among many. The early 20th century was a tumultuous time in England, as the gap between the economically comfortable, educated elites and the toiling populace widened during an era of exploding mass communication. Radio broadcasting for the public brought programming such as the Priestley-Nicolson debates to millions of people (the BBC formed in the fall of 1922). Book clubs encouraged more buying of books—and began to shape personal tastes as well as political affiliations. That highbrow automatically meant good art while lowbrow meant bad art was not a given. For Woolf, and other writers who were pushing formal boundaries of literature, the stakes of taste transformation were high.
Suspicion toward the highbrow consumer predated critics such as Priestley. “The more literature one scorned, the better highbrow one was,” an anonymous ex-reviewer admitted in The Atlantic in 1918. “I was at perfect liberty to denounce the literary product of the day—for a highbrow is not supposed to be very enthusiastic about his contemporaries. And certainly no one expected me to like the things in the magazines.”
But in the battle of the brows, the most unconscionable kind to be was the dreaded middlebrow, according to Woolf: Both the highbrow and the lowbrow know their likes and dislikes, but the middlebrow “is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself.” The middlebrow is a dishonest consumer of art who prefers smoothed out depictions of life and molds their tastes to current fashions: “If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me ‘middlebrow,’” Woolf declared, “I will take my pen and stab him, dead.”
Take her withering assessment of a “middlebrow” writer’s book, which he sent her, unsolicited, after they met at a party: “And I read a page here, and I read a page there (I am breakfasting, as usual, in bed). And it is not well written; nor is it badly written.” Here, I couldn’t help but think of my colleague Ian Bogost’s review of the maybe-AI band Velvet Sundown’s album: “It’s not bad. It’s not good either. It’s more like nothing—not good or bad, aesthetically or morally.”
While Woolf’s definition of middlebrow is exclusively pejorative, the term has softened and stretched over time, referring to anything perceived as pedestrian and harmless: beer, Taylor Swift, joke-y pronunciations of the department store Target (that is, Tar-jay). Apparently, Woolf had second thoughts and never sent her letter; it was published in a posthumous collection of her work, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. The Atlantic ran it in its July 1942 issue, with a glowing footnote that Woolf had “produced some of the most graceful and glittering prose of our time.”
If only Woolf could’ve seen that high-, low-, and middlebrow discourse continues to haunt today’s literary world, in many of the same ways it haunted her interwar one. In the beginning of the 21st century, for instance, Jonathan Franzen railed at the inclusion of his book The Corrections in Oprah Winfrey’s book club, setting off another battle of the literary brows, in which authors and critics sounded off about the marketing value of Oprah’s seal of approval as well as Franzen’s ungrateful (or virtuous) adherence to his own literary aesthetics. Whether Woolf’s fiery attack on the middlebrow offends or delights you, her letter reveals an undeniable truth: A pronouncement of taste is a declaration of war, and if you make one, be prepared for battle.
