S.G. Tallentyre

S.G. Tallentyre served as English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall's pen name for literary history, biography, and fiction. The Friends Of Voltaire presents ten eighteenth-century thinkers and public figures whose lives intersected with Voltaire and with one another. First published by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1906, the book organizes its portraits around memorable roles: Diderot appears as the talker, d'Alembert as the thinker, and Condorcet as the aristocrat. Hall's method combines biographical anecdote with an account of Enlightenment debate, giving each subject an individual profile while tracing a shared intellectual circle. The volume also contains her famous summary of Voltaire's commitment to free expression, a sentence often mistaken for his own words. Hall had already written a two-volume Life of Voltaire and later translated selections from his correspondence, so this compact group portrait belongs to sustained work on the French writer and his period. It remains the title most closely associated with the Tallentyre name.