Called Back is an 1883 mystery/romance novel written by Englishman Frederick John Fargus under the pseudonym Hugh Conway and published in Bristol by J. W. Arrowsmith.
Over 350,000 copies were sold within four years, and Fargus produced a stage version in London in 1884. The book was popular during the 1880s in Amherst, Massachusetts, a fact that has been correlated with the use of the phrase "called back" by American poet Emily Dickinson in her later life. The book, which a friend sent to her, impressed her. She used the title in a later letter. In what was evidently the last letter she composed shortly before she died in May 1886, she simply wrote, "Little Cousins, Called back. Emily."
Notes
- Frederick Wilse Bateson (1940). The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. CUP Archive. p. 540. GGKEY:SQT257C7TNL.
- Martha Nell Smith; Mary Loeffelholz (12 December 2013). A Companion to Emily Dickinson. Wiley. p. 82. ISBN 978-1-118-83602-6.
- Emily Dickinson (1971). Selected letters. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 315. ISBN 9780674250604.
- Barton Levi St Armand (27 June 1986). Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society. CUP Archive. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-521-33978-0.
- Johnson, Thomas H., ed. (1965). The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Second ed.). Harvard University Press. p. 906.