Sugar, Spice, and Suffragettes: When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill

I admit, I am tired of feminist retellings.

Or rather, books marketed as powerful treatises on female rage, when in reality, they are often little more than palatable, watered-down morsels of women’s empowerment, lacking any nuance. Unfortunately, even fictional empowerment remains a privilege usually afforded to classically beautiful, relatively upper-class white women, who enjoy maximum visibility in such narratives—often at the cost of more marginalized communities.

Thankfully, Heather O’Neill’s When We Lost Our Heads does not succumb to any such issues. This delightful historical queer novel, set during the years of the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Montreal, retells the lives of Marie Antoinette and Marquis de Sade, reimagining them as spoiled teenage girls from upper class families living in the city’s affluent Golden Mile neighborhood.

It is a unique premise. Here, Marie Antoine is the coddled daughter of a wealthy sugar baron, who in her teenage years befriends Sadie Arnett: a girl of razor-sharp wit, with a hedonistic, delinquent personality. However, their passionate friendship soon culminates in a horrifying tragedy which drives the pair apart. It is only years later, as the city simmers with poverty, discontent, and the first organized workers’ revolts, that Marie and Sadie’s paths cross each other once again, alongside the lives of numerous working-class women around them. As they struggle with their sense of self, the two women now seek a place for themselves in the new feminist movement.

Honestly, I expected yet another commodified “female rage” narrative: flowery musings on womanhood and grief, dolled up in aesthetics. Like Sofia Coppola’s 2006 adaptation of Marie Antoinette—that dreamy, pastel, sugar-spun glimpse at the tragic loss of innocence, a cinematic experience which gently filters out the oppression of the exploited masses as background noise to the heroine’s gorgeously filmed suffering.

But thankfully, this wasn’t the case with When We Lost Our Heads. At the heart of the novel lies a toxic, messy, sapphic friendship-to-rivals bildungsroman, but also a sharp historical critique of workers’ exploitation by wealthy industrialists, including women in power. It focuses on the complicated crossroads of gender, sexuality, class and privilege through the decades. It acknowledges the shared experiences of women, including violence and workplace abuse, irrespective of societal differences. But it also rejects simplistic feminist messaging, not conferring easy victimhood to all women. Especially not women who participate in systemic oppression and exploitation.

Sure, Marie and Sadie are compelling, charismatic, even occasionally sympathetic female leads—but not the sole focus of the novel. There’s George, Sadie’s lover, a butch midwife fostered by sex workers, who participates in the suffragette movement and labors to aid and empower oppressed women in her city. There’s Mary Robespierre: an embittered, fiercely ambitious young factory worker discontented with the life forced upon her. These aren’t people ordinarily represented in “feminist” retellings. Their pain and struggles are too mundane to be aesthetic, even as these very struggles make possible our protagonists’ pleasurable lifestyles.

The novel also cleverly subverts predictable “feminist retelling” tropes, highlighting how snobbish and self-victimizing wealthy women often are. Marie denies her factory workers basic human rights, exploits her household staff, and then complains about the hardships of being young, rich, and responsible; Sadie sneers at the same impoverished sex workers who housed her when she was homeless and vulnerable on the streets, cruelly abandons her devoted lesbian partner (after profiting off her labor) to return to the shallow embrace of Marie, and laments that everybody hates her because she is too sexually emancipated. We bear witness to their selfishness, as O’Neill wryly notes, “No oppressor actually sees themselves as one. They, like everyone else, are too busy identifying themselves as victims.” Be it past historical eras, or even in contemporary feminist spaces, this book perfectly encapsulates how some women will always get to commandeer history, eulogized as heroines or martyrs, even as they remain complicit in the mistreatment of less fortunate people. Again and again, Marie and Sadie choose themselves, their wealth, privilege and entitled claims to status and glory over their own community. It personally liberates them. It narratively dooms them. Their final judgement, when it comes, is not doled out by evil men, but at the hands of the women they oppressed.

Ultimately, in the comfortable privacy of our heroines’ heads, maybe this book remains a tragic tale about how powerful female individuals must always pay the price for their ambition and their uninhibited sexuality by being socially outcast. Maybe in a different retelling, that might’ve actually been the interpretation. But When We Lost Our Heads is not such a story—and therein lies its wry, understated brilliance, making it a refreshing antidote to palatable feminist narratives: a fictionalized response from women too ordinary, too marginalized, to warrant a “feminist” retelling of their own, and must thus haunt the margins of stories about girls prettier, wealthier, and luckier than themselves. I cannot recommend it enough.

Please add When We Lost Our Heads to your TBR on Goodreads and follow Heather O’Neill on Instagram (@oneillreads).

Rating: *****

Content warnings: sexual assault, workplace misogyny, sexual harassment, self-harm, gun violence, murder, police brutality, forced institutionalization, transphobia, classism, animal cruelty, child abuse, body horror