Middlebrow
Based on Wikipedia: Middlebrow
Virginia Woolf hated you. Well, not you specifically—but probably you, if we're being honest. She hated the books you read, the art you admire, and especially the way you talk about both at dinner parties. She called people like you "middlebrow," and she meant it as an insult.
The curious thing is that Woolf never actually sent her most vicious attack on middlebrow culture. In 1941, she wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the New Statesman & Nation, a British political magazine, responding to a radio broadcast that had criticized highbrow intellectuals as detached from ordinary life. But she never posted it. The letter sat in a drawer until after her death, when it was published in a 1942 essay collection called The Death of the Moth.
What made Woolf so angry? And why does this obscure literary insult from a century ago still echo through our cultural debates today?
The Anatomy of the Brow
The word "middlebrow" first appeared in 1925, in the British satirical magazine Punch. It was a joke, riffing on "highbrow" and "lowbrow"—terms that themselves came from phrenology, the thoroughly debunked Victorian pseudoscience that claimed you could read a person's character from the bumps on their skull. A high forehead supposedly indicated intelligence. A low one suggested more primitive instincts.
The joke stuck because it captured something real about how culture was stratifying in the early twentieth century.
Highbrow meant the avant-garde: difficult modernist poetry, atonal music, abstract painting. Art that demanded effort and specialized knowledge. Art that didn't care whether you enjoyed it.
Lowbrow meant popular entertainment: pulp novels, slapstick comedy, dance hall music. Art that aimed to please, made no pretensions, and never apologized for being fun.
And middlebrow? That was the anxious space in between. People who wanted the prestige of high culture without doing the work. Books that looked impressive on shelves. Opinions borrowed from critics rather than formed through genuine engagement.
Woolf's Contempt
In her unsent letter, Woolf didn't mince words. Middlebrows, she wrote, were "in pursuit of no single object, neither Art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige."
Notice what bothers her most: the mixing. The impurity. Middlebrows aren't wrong because they fail to appreciate art—they're wrong because they appreciate it for the wrong reasons. They read books that other people have told them are great, rather than discovering what they genuinely love. They chase cultural capital, treating literature and music as investments in their social standing rather than as experiences worth having for their own sake.
Woolf had surprising respect for lowbrows. She described them as people "of thoroughbred vitality" who ride through life at a gallop, devoted to their work and pleasures without pretension. The lowbrow construction worker who comes home to a beer and a boxing match is living authentically. He's not pretending to be something he isn't.
But the middlebrow? Always pretending. Always performing. Always looking over their shoulder to see who's watching.
"We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like," Woolf wrote. The implied contrast is damning. Middlebrows read what they're supposed to like. They do what's expected. They praise what they've been told to praise.
The Counterattack
Not everyone accepted Woolf's categories so neatly.
In 1949, the American writer Russell Lynes published an essay called "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow" that both expanded and satirized the whole framework. He quoted Woolf and other highbrow critics extensively—including Clement Greenberg, the influential art critic who championed Abstract Expressionism—and suggested that all these careful distinctions were really just ways of maintaining artificial hierarchies.
Lynes had fun with the taxonomy. He subdivided the middlebrow into upper-middlebrow and lower-middlebrow, describing their consumer preferences in elaborate detail. Upper-middlebrows were the patrons who actually funded cultural institutions: the museum donors, the symphony subscribers, the people who bought first editions from independent bookstores. Without them, highbrow culture would starve.
Lower-middlebrows, meanwhile, were "hell-bent on improving their minds, as well as their fortunes." They lived, Lynes wrote, in "a world that smells of soap"—the aspirational cleanliness of magazine advertisements promising that the right products could lift you into a higher class.
When Life magazine ran a chart based on Lynes's essay, showing which foods and furniture and arts belonged to which brow level, it caused a minor national crisis. Americans pored over the chart anxiously, worried that their favorite things might reveal them as lower than they'd hoped.
The British Broadcasting Corporation of Brows
The British, characteristically, turned the debate into a matter of radio programming.
The BBC operated three stations in the mid-twentieth century. The Third Programme aired experimental music, dense literary discussions, and foreign-language drama. The Light Programme offered popular entertainment: comedy shows, pop music, variety acts. And in between sat the Home Service, with its news bulletins, afternoon plays, and what the novelist J.B. Priestley praised as "cosiness and plainness."
Priestley tried to rehabilitate the middlebrow. He described the Home Service's audience as earnest, friendly, ethically concerned—"broadbrows," he called them, occupying "a fine gap" between the pretensions of the high and the simplicity of the low.
Woolf, still alive when Priestley mounted this defense, dismissed it with a nickname for the Home Service: the "Betwixt and Between Company."
Mass Culture and the American Nightmare
The debate took a darker turn in 1960, when the American critic Dwight Macdonald published an essay called "Masscult and Midcult." Macdonald was worried about more than snobbery. He was worried about industrial capitalism's effect on culture itself.
Macdonald distinguished between three cultural phenomena. Highbrow culture was specialized, made by and for connoisseurs who understood particular traditions deeply. Lowbrow culture was authentic folk production: blues music, regional crafts, working-class entertainments that emerged organically from specific communities.
Masscult—mass culture—was something new and dangerous. Factory-produced entertainment designed by committees to appeal to the largest possible audience, made "to please the crowd by any means." Masscult had no traditions, no community, no authenticity. It copied and manipulated both high and low culture, strip-mining them for content while caring nothing for their values.
But Midcult was worse. Middlebrow culture, in Macdonald's telling, was Masscult wearing a tuxedo. It "pretends to respect the standards of High Culture, while, in fact, it waters them down and vulgarizes them." It gave audiences the feeling of engaging with serious art while demanding nothing from them.
Macdonald's examples were pointed. He attacked Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the beloved 1938 play about life in small-town New Hampshire, as sentimental pretension dressed up as profundity. He went after Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, suggesting that the Nobel Prize-winning novella was really just Hemingway-lite, a simplified version of his earlier, more challenging work. He even criticized American collegiate gothic architecture—all those stone towers and fake medieval cloisters on university campuses—as architectural Midcult, copying the forms of tradition without understanding their meaning.
Macdonald's solution? Separation. Keep the brows apart. "The few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc. have their High Culture, and don't fuzz up the distinction with the Midcult."
The Book Club Problem
Few institutions have embodied middlebrow anxiety quite like the book club.
The Book-of-the-Month Club launched in 1926, promising to deliver the best new books directly to subscribers' homes. A panel of judges—writers and critics—selected each month's book, saving busy readers the trouble of figuring out what to read next. It was enormously successful, and it was immediately controversial.
Was the Book-of-the-Month Club democratizing literature, bringing serious writing to people who might not otherwise encounter it? Or was it outsourcing taste, encouraging readers to let experts do their thinking for them?
The historian Janice Radway spent years studying the club for her 1997 book A Feeling for Books. She traced its evolution from a genuine attempt to spread literary culture to a purely commercial enterprise by the 1980s. But she also challenged the simple condemnation. Middlebrow culture, Radway argued, wasn't just a pale imitation of highbrow taste. It had defined itself in opposition to the avant-garde, deliberately rejecting difficulty in favor of accessibility.
That tension exploded publicly in 2001, when the novelist Jonathan Franzen learned that his novel The Corrections had been selected for Oprah's Book Club.
Oprah Winfrey's book recommendations were phenomenally powerful. A single mention on her show could sell hundreds of thousands of copies, transforming obscure literary novels into bestsellers. For a serious novelist, the commercial potential was irresistible.
But Franzen complained publicly about the selection. He worried that being associated with Oprah's Book Club was inconsistent with his place in "the high art literary tradition." He distinguished between literary fiction and "entertaining books," clearly suggesting that the latter was beneath him—even though he carefully avoided using the word "middlebrow" and later claimed not to know what it meant.
The incident laid bare the anxieties at the heart of the middlebrow debate. Franzen wanted the sales that Oprah could deliver. But he didn't want to be seen wanting them. He wanted to remain above the commercial fray even while benefiting from the largest commercial platform for books in America.
Years earlier, in a 1996 essay for Harper's Magazine, Franzen had complained about book clubs "treating literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socializing." Literature, he implied, should be difficult. It should require effort. And that effort should be individual, not communal.
The Golden Age of Middlebrow
Something strange happened in the 2000s and 2010s. The term "middlebrow" started to lose its sting.
Slate Magazine, the online publication known for its contrarian takes, suggested that this period might represent "the golden age of middlebrow art." The evidence? Television shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, and The Wire—dramas that combined accessible storytelling with literary ambition, mass audiences with critical prestige.
These shows weren't difficult in the way that avant-garde art was difficult. You didn't need specialized training to appreciate them. But they were complex, morally serious, formally inventive. They rewarded attention and rewarded rewatching. They provoked discussion and interpretation.
Slate added novels like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom—yes, the same Franzen who worried about Oprah—to the list, along with Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. These were books that appeared on bestseller lists and won literary prizes, that were read by book clubs and taught in universities.
Was this middlebrow? Or had the categories finally broken down?
Upper-Middle-Brow
In 2012, the critic William Deresiewicz proposed adding a new category: "upper middle brow."
Writing in The American Scholar, Deresiewicz described a cultural register that fell between mass culture and the traditional middlebrow. It was "infinitely subtler than Midcult," he wrote. "It is post- rather than pre-ironic, its sentimentality hidden by a veil of cool. It is edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive."
Think of the music of Leonard Cohen, which one critic described as "a kind of pop—upper-middle-brow to lower-high-brow, to be sure, but pop nonetheless." Or the films of Aaron Sorkin, with their rapid-fire dialogue and political earnestness. Or podcasts like Radiolab and Serial, which bring journalistic sophistication to mass audiences.
Upper-middle-brow doesn't pretend to be high art. It knows exactly what it is. It's smart entertainment that flatters its audience's intelligence without demanding too much of it. And crucially, it's in on the joke. It uses irony to protect itself from accusations of pretension.
Wikipedia and the Infinite Library
In a 2011 essay for The New Yorker, the writer Macy Halford made an observation that might have horrified Virginia Woolf.
Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker itself, Halford suggested, were "often viewed as prime examples of the middlebrow." Both publications were "devoted to the high but also to making it accessible to many; to bringing ideas that might remain trapped in ivory towers and academic books, or in high-art (or film or theatre) scenes, into the pages of a relatively inexpensive periodical."
The New Yorker—the magazine that published Woolf's contemporaries, that championed modernist literature, that has always prided itself on its cultural sophistication—middlebrow?
But Halford's point was larger than any one publication. The internet, she argued, was forcing a complete rethinking of what middlebrow means. When the highest and lowest culture are both just a click away, when anyone can access academic journals and viral videos with equal ease, what does it mean to walk the middle line?
Halford described Wikipedia itself as "a kind of middlebrow product"—and meant it as a compliment. Wikipedia makes specialized knowledge accessible. It provides summaries and entry points. It doesn't demand expertise, but it rewards curiosity.
This is the strange fate of the middlebrow in the twenty-first century. The category that once marked cultural insecurity has become, in some ways, the dominant mode of cultural engagement. We are all middlebrow now, consuming a mix of high and low, serious and entertaining, challenging and accessible. We get our opera from movie theater simulcasts and our literary criticism from podcasts. We read novels that book clubs recommend and then discuss them in online forums.
Would Virginia Woolf be appalled? Almost certainly. But then, she never did send that letter.
The Persistent Anxiety
The debate over middlebrow culture has never really been about art. It's been about authenticity, about status anxiety, about the fear of being exposed as a fraud.
When Woolf attacked middlebrows for reading books because others told them to, she was articulating a fear that haunts anyone who cares about culture: the fear that their taste isn't really their own. That their opinions are borrowed. That someone might ask a follow-up question they can't answer.
This is why the word "middlebrow" still stings, even now. It suggests you're faking it. That you're performing sophistication rather than embodying it. That beneath the veneer of culture, there's nothing but aspiration and insecurity.
But there's another way to look at it.
The postmodern philosophers—those who came after the great modernist critics like Woolf and Macdonald—saw something valuable in the middlebrow perspective. They noticed that middlebrow people were often highly aware of high culture. They understood its value. They just didn't organize their entire lives around it.
And maybe that's not failure. Maybe that's balance.
To be middlebrow, in this more generous reading, is to be someone who loves art but also has a job. Who reads serious books but also watches television. Who cares about ideas but also about dinner parties. Who balances the aesthetic demands of high art with the practical demands of daily life.
That sounds less like a failing and more like being human.
In the end, the categories of highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow tell us less about art than about our anxieties surrounding it. They reveal our fears about authenticity, our desire for status, and our uncertainty about whether culture is something we genuinely love or something we use to impress others.
Perhaps the wisest response to the whole debate is the one suggested by Woolf herself, though she intended it only for the elect: read what you like, do what you like, and praise what you like. The trick is figuring out what you actually like, as opposed to what you think you should like.
That's harder than it sounds. But it's probably the only path out of the brow game entirely.