Heathcliff wasn’t ‘like a Gypsy’ - He WAS a Gypsy, says Romani campaigner

Romani campaigner Violet Cannon wades into the controversy over the ‘whitewashing’ casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennel’s new Wuthering Heights film

Violet Cannon, a prominent Romani campaigner, has re-ignited the ‘white-washing’ controversy over the casting of white actor Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in the just-released film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic novel ‘Wuthering Heights’ by claiming that Heathcliff is meant to be a Romani character.

Many critics have  complained that the casting of Elordi is ‘whitewashing’ a character from the novel who is not white – and who instead is meant to be black, or South Asian or an ambiguous racial ‘other’ - but Violet Cannon says that they are guilty of the same things themselves in "erasing" Romani culture and ethnicity.

In Violet Cannon’s latest blog on her website ‘Proud Gypsy Traveller’, the Director and CEO of York Traveller Trust, writes:

"There is something deeply familiar about the current online narrative surrounding the new Wuthering Heights adaptation. Familiar, because Romani people have seen this move before

The argument goes something like this: “Gypsy was a generic term.” Or “He was probably meant to be Black, or generally ‘other’.” Or worse: “The Brontës wouldn’t have really known what a Gypsy was — they lived in a small village.”

No. No. And absolutely not.

This isn’t nuance. This is erasure — polite, academic-sounding erasure — and it lands with the same old weight. Heathcliff Is Explicitly Described as a Gypsy."

That Heathcliff was a Gypsy has hardly ever been mentioned in critical discussions about the portrayal of Heathcliff over the years by white actors – and one black actor – in the many film and TV adaptions of Emily Bronte’s 18th Century literary classic.

Yet Violet Cannon, who was born on the road with her Romany family, comes back at these critics in a blistering final statement in her blog:

“Why are you so eager to erase one of the few unmistakably Romani characters in the English canon? We have been written out of history. Why are you so keen for us to be written out of literature too?”

READ VIOLET CANNON’S FULL BLOG ON PROUD GYPSY TRAVELLER BY CLICKING THIS LINK: Heathcliff Was a Gypsy — and Erasing That Isn’t Radical, It’s Repetition

(And while you are there have a dig around – Proud Gypsy Traveller contains some excellent and thought-provoking writing)

TT News

(Image: Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights 2026. Credit Warner Bros)