The Philistine Revolution: Ethel Mannin, Virginia Woolf and The Battle of the Brows

The language of the Brows – highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow – has continued to shape how we think and talk about literature today, with middlebrow remaining the most contested and debated of the three. Notions of what should and should not be classified as high art were first determined by the innovators, the modernists themselves, including Virginia Woolf, whose letter to The New Statesman , “Middlebrow”, is considered one of the most definitive examples of how literature and readerships were categorised and critiqued. Middlebrow author Ethel Mannin, writing at the same time as Woolf, posed a significant challenge to the Battle of the Brows that has gone unrecognised in scholarship. In the 1930s, she and Woolf produced works, fiction and non-fiction, that appeared to speak directly to each other in a battle fought unknowingly between two authors who exemplify opposing sides of the cultural debate, and the zeitgeist of the period. When placed side-by-side with Woolf’s “Middlebrow”, her diary entries about literary form, and how she explored these ideas in her novel, The Waves , Mannin’s reframing of the Battle of the Brows as between “Philistines” and highbrows in Confessions and Impressions (1930), creatively illustrated by her critique of cultural hierarchies in her novel Ragged Banners: A Novel with an Index (1931), amount to new definitions of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow that redefine the Battle as a site of class conflict.