VIRGINIA WOOLF HAD NO time for “middlebrows”. In a 1932 letter to the New Statesman she gushed about highbrows and lowbrows and laid into the “betwixt and between”.

Their lives, she suggested, were banal and suburban; they lacked taste and originality; and, dear, oh dear, read the wrong sort of books and bought the wrong sort of furniture.

“If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares calls me ‘middlebrow’,” she concluded, “I will take my pen and stab him, dead.” Fortunately perhaps, she never posted the letter, which, in all its snobbery and apparent lack of irony, is likely to be much debated today at “Investigating the Middlebrow”, a conference at Sheffield Hallam University.

Delegates from as far afield as Antwerp, Ohio and Melbourne will discuss such once-popular authors as Winifred Holtby, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Elizabeth Von Arnim and Dorothy Whipple.

Like Warwick Deeping, Gilbert Frankau, Stella Gibbons, Ethel M. Dell, Jeffery Farnol, Angela Thirkell and a host of others, they have faded from view or are remembered for just one or two books. They represent a musty, unfashionable sort of fiction, shunned for being both pretentious and unchallenging.

George Orwell blazed a trail for their neglect in 1936 when he dismissed popular novels in general as “Galsworthy-and-water stuff” and the racy romances of Dell in particular as “read solely by women . . .(though) not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists”.

The conference has been organised by Mary Grover, who teaches at the university, and Erica Brown, a PhD student there. They argue that “middlebrow” novels are a vital cultural barometer of their time.

“The strange thing is that if you’re looking at the 16th century, at Shakespeare and Jonson, it’s perfectly all right to look at everything lowbrow that relates to them,” Dr Grover says. “But if it’s the 20th century, it somehow compromises your academic credentials to look at this sort of books.”

She is about to publish a study of the most celebrated (or despised) of all, Warwick Deeping, the best known of whose 68 novels, Sorrell and Son, has run to 41 editions and has been translated into 13 languages.

Some academics dismiss Deeping as mediocre, prurient and reactionary. In 1932, Q. D. Leavis reviled him for “touching grossly on fine issues”. Dr Grover responds that his books deal uncompromisingly with such subjects as alcoholism, euthanasia, syphilis, rape and cross-dressing.

Ms Brown, who is working on a PhD about Von Arnim (most famous for Enchanted April and Elizabeth and her German Garden), says that “middlebrow” novels often explore such issues on a domestic scale, an approach acceptable with 19th-century authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës – but not with their 20th-century successors.

“The key word that people always use about middlebrow books is ‘cosy’,” she says. “But so many aren’t.”

Nicola Beauman, whose Perse-phone Books imprint has rehabilitated dozens of half-forgotten authors, marketing them as chic, accessible and “feminist with a little ‘f’ ”, will be discussing Whipple, who was hugely successful in the 1930s and 1940s, hailed by J. B. Priestley as “the Jane Austen of the 20th century”. Since when, near-oblivion.

“Ivy Compton-Burnett adored Whipple’s books,” Ms Beauman says. “She got them out of Harrods lending library but would hide them when her literary friends came round.”

So, who would be today’s equivalents of these authors? Grover and Brown suggest Joanna Trollope, Rosamund Pilcher and Mary Wesley.

“With the work we’re discussing, we’re saying that some of it is good, some of it is interesting but not good, but all of it is interesting,” Brown says. “There’s a rich seam to be mined.”

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