For many of her contemporaries during the early 1930s, “Woolf in the city” was nearly synonymous with “Woolf in Bloomsbury” and led directly to thoughts on both her cultural capital and that of the space she worked and lived within. Woolf's identity was seemingly irrevocably linked to her satirized portraits in fiction, comic illustrations, literary criticism, and even reviews by a celebrated critic in leading periodicals, as she recorded it in the posthumously published “Middlebrow” (1942). Whether she was hailed as the “high priestess of Bloomsbury” by the mocking Arnold Bennett, parodied as the “very very distinguished novelist” in E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930) (Delafield 78), or portrayed in one of Sylvia Townsend Warner's comic scenes of Bloomsbury life in Time and Tide (Warner 1057), such depictions of Woolf were often one-dimensional and limiting. Indeed, by upholding static images of both Woolf and the “highbrow” Bloomsbury sphere, they enforced the very cultural hierarchies that Woolf boldly satirized, challenged, and grappled with at the height of the “battle of the brows” through her life and work in and on the city.

As a London writer, Woolf's movements within the literary public sphere extended far beyond Bloomsbury. Whether she was attending a dinner hosted by the middlebrow Rose Macaulay (D3 70–71), spending the evening with the best-selling Berta Ruck (17), or attending a popular play such as The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Woolf moved in a range of high and middlebrow spheres. In doing so, however, she was keenly aware of the disparities between her own cultural capital and that of her contemporaries, particularly that of women writers. As she wrote in September 1925, she was “the only woman in England to write what [she] like[d]”; all others were forced to think of “series and editors” (D3 43). But rather than embrace this highbrow status during the early 1930s, Woolf interrogated the basis for cultural capital and imagined spaces that moved beyond hierarchical aesthetic systems. Indeed, while others were striving to achieve or maintain their distinction by policing culturally constructed divides, Woolf openly participated in middlebrow culture in her novel Flush by responding to Rudolph Besier's popular drama The Barretts of WimpoleStreet in the playful style of her contemporary middlebrow women writers.