There's this pervasive orientalist tone in her stories that bugged me even in stories that were about white people. I think it is safe to call it racist. Most apparent was in the the first story, the namesake Black Venus and the third story, Our Lady of Massacre. The latter is about an enslaved woman of unknown race (probably Black?) who escaped her enslavers to go to the Indians but then got captured back again by the white people.

And honestly what is the point of it all? It feels like a gratuitous exhibitionism, covered in prose. It reeks of "Oh i can write tragedies about women of the world too, yay me!" that kind of self-righteous, self-assured attitude that so many white women writers have these days. The last story in the collection is the most salvageable of them all, it was quite alright. Good even.

Maybe miss Angela Carter should just stick to writing about white women and their life. The only good thing about this though, it managed to make me hate Baudelaire.