“No, no, dear friend, my palace-home is lonely”: architecture and social structure in Dollie Radford’s poetry

This study explores the connection between social structure and architecture in Dollie Radford’s poems, particularly how architectural spaces served as a metaphor for gendered experience and emotional interiority in Victorian society. Through an in-depth reading of selected diary entries and poems from her published works, A Light Load (1891), Songs and Other Verses (1895), and In Summer Time (1905), this study argues that Radford reimagines home and city as spaces of isolation, surveillance, and social performance. It situates Radford’s architectural metaphors along with those of other Victorian women poets, including Felicia Hemans and Emily Brontë, to identify how they use spatial imagery to navigate autonomy within patriarchal structures. It contributes to the extant scholarship on the interaction between architecture and literature, calling for attention to women’s poetry and a reconsideration of Victorian women’s poetry as a significant form for concretizing embodied experiences.