Virginia Woolf and the Middlebrow Market of the Familiar Essay

Abstract

In “Middlebrow,” Virginia Woolf attacked the category of the “Broadbrow,” defended by J. B. Priestley in a talk on the BBC (Priestley, “High”).¹ As Melba Cuddy-Keane has shown, Woolf posited her “democratic highbrowism” against the middlebrow, which she scorned as a debased product of mass culture (22–34).² My argument will trace Woolf’s critique of middlebrowism back to her criticism of modern familiar essays. At the end of the nineteenth century, and above all in the first decades of the twentieth century, the familiar essay became a regular feature of a great number of periodicals. Professional essayists such as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, A. G. Gardiner, E. V. Lucas, Robert Lynd, and J. B. Priestley, among others, wrote regularly about everyday topics in the conversational tone characteristic of the genre. Then known as “middles,” on account of their position in the papers, familiar essays benefited from a wide circulation through mass journalism and mass publishing. Woolf’s occasional, non-review essays have never been considered in relation to the marketing techniques and middlebrow ethos of her contemporary essayists. By recontextualizing her strategies of self-promotion within the vogue of¹—and controversy surrounding—the familiar essay, I would like to highlight the cultural critique at work in her material engagement with the genre.