[4] In 1941, Virginia Woolf derided the middlebrow mentality in an un-posted letter to the editor of the New Statesman & Nation, concerning a radio broadcast that attacked the highbrows of British society as people intellectually detached from everyday life.
Instead of such social and intellectual freedom, the middlebrows are betwixt and between, people whom Woolf characterises as "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".
Members of the lower-middlebrow stratum also live the simple, easy life offered in advertisements wherein "lower middlebrow-ism" was "a world that smells of soap".
B. Priestley sought to create a positive cultural space for the concept of the middlebrow, which would be characterised by earnestness, friendliness, and ethical concern;[10] and couched his defence of the middlebrow in terms of radio stations, praising the BBC Home Service for cosiness and plainness, a cultural space midway between the Light Programme and the Third Programme, "between the raucous lowbrows and the lisping highbrows [there] is a fine gap, meant for the middle or broadbrows .
[11] In the struggles and competitions among the intelligentsia for the attention of readers and to generate cultural capital, Virginia Woolf responded to Priestly's defence of the middlebrow by dubbing the BBC Home Service as "Betwixt and Between Company".
[17] In a 1996 essay in Harper's Magazine, Franzen lamented book clubs for "treating literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socializing".
[19] Slate Magazine suggests that the late 2000s and early 2010s could potentially be considered the "golden age of middlebrow art"—pointing to television shows Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos and The Wire and novels Freedom, The Marriage Plot and A Visit from the Goon Squad.
[21] In a March 2012 article for Jewish Ideas Daily, Peodair Leihy described the work of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen as "a kind of pop—upper-middle-brow to lower-high-brow, to be sure, but pop nonetheless".
[22] This aesthetic was further theorized in an essay from November that year for The American Scholar that saw William Deresiewicz propose the addition of "upper middle brow", a culture falling between masscult and midcult.
"[23] In The New Yorker, Macy Halford characterizes Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker itself as "often [being] viewed as prime examples of the middlebrow: both magazines are 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 that can be bought at bookstores and newsstands across the country (and now on the Internet)."