Wickham Coin Books in Order

The Wickham Coin books are a compact two novella experiment built around one unusually slippery question: who is George Wickham, really?

Both stories bring Darcy and Georgiana to Hertfordshire, both give Elizabeth a fresh way of crossing their path, and both turn on Wickham's presence. In Georgiana's Folly, Darcy asks Elizabeth to help him manage Georgiana while Wickham is nearby, and the story imagines the most generous possible reading of Wickham without snapping completely away from Austen. Georgiana matters a great deal here. So does the possibility that youthful feeling may be seeing something others miss.

Elizabeth's Plight flips the coin. After Elizabeth rescues Georgiana from ruin, the danger closes around her instead, and Wickham is no misunderstood romantic at all. The tone is sharper, more openly suspenseful, and more action driven.

That is really the point of this mini-series. The same basic ingredients, Georgiana, Elizabeth, Darcy, Wickham, Hertfordshire, can produce two very different moral stories depending on what sort of man Wickham is. The books are short, brisk, and easy to read together, and taken as a pair they make a neat little study in how much one changed interpretation can alter an entire Austen plot.