In a recent discussion in an online literature course, someone thought that the young woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and the character Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway were both threatened by inactivity imposed on them by pompous medical men. This led to the question whether Virginia Woolf had read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story. Date-wise it is possible, since "The Yellow Wallpaper" was published in The New England Magazine in 1892, and Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925. However, I'm not sure whether The New England Magazine, which ceased publication in 1917, had enough circulation outside the USA, or whether the short story was sufficiently well-known to come to Woolf's notice.
So is there any evidence that Virginia Woolf read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story before 1925?
