author
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
1868–1956
Best known for her lively books on Voltaire, she wrote with wit, clarity, and a strong feel for the world of ideas. Her famous line about defending free speech is often quoted, though it was her own summary of Voltaire’s attitude rather than a direct quotation from him.
2 Audiobooks
The Friends of Voltaire
by Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The life of Voltaire
by Evelyn Beatrice Hall
About the author
Born in England on September 28, 1868, she wrote under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre and became best known for her studies of Voltaire and his circle. Her The Life of Voltaire appeared in 1903, followed by The Friends of Voltaire in 1906, books that helped bring Enlightenment history to a wide general readership.
She is especially remembered for a sentence many people mistake for Voltaire’s exact words: her famous formulation about disagreeing with what someone says while defending their right to say it was written as her own paraphrase of his attitude. That line gave her an unusual afterlife in modern debates about free expression, even though her work was really rooted in literary history and biography.
Hall died on April 13, 1956. Although she is not as widely known as some of the figures she wrote about, her books remain part of the long conversation about Voltaire, tolerance, and the history of ideas.