Evelyn Beatrice Hall

1868–1956 · English biographer · pen name ‘S. G. Tallentyre’

Evelyn Beatrice Hall was an English writer and biographer who published under the pen name S. G. Tallentyre. Her The Life of Voltaire (1903) and The Friends of Voltaire (1906) were popular Edwardian biographies. In the latter she coined the free-speech maxim as a distillation of Voltaire’s outlook — a line that would eclipse her own name and be handed back to her subject for over a century.

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“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”

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