Voltaire’s English alter-ego unmasked by new letters

14 newly-discovered letters by Francois Voltaire have allowed an Oxford University team to shed light on his brief but important time in England. Two of the new letters shed new light on the extent of the author's interactions with the English aristocracy and in one letter he even signs his name 'Francis Voltaire' - something he has never before been recorded as doing. The letters have been edited by Professor Nicholas Cronk, director of Oxford University's Voltaire Foundation and lecturer in the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty, and are being made available online in the Bodleian Library's Electronic Enlightenment project. Professor Cronk said: 'Voltaire spent two important but relatively undocumented years in England in his early thirties at a time when he was best known as a poet - he arrived with only a recommendation from the British Ambassador to Paris. While here, he was exposed to ideas of English writers and later took empiricism back to the Continent where it became the basis for the Enlightenment. These newly-discovered letters are therefore very interesting because they show how Voltaire's close interaction with the English aristocracy exposed him to Enlightenment ideas and help us to piece together the nature of those interactions.' One letter is from Voltaire to Lord Bathurst, a patron of the arts who often hosted great English thinkers at his manor, Richings, including Alexander Pope who wrote much of his translation of Homer there. In this letter Voltaire thanks Bathurst for 'the freedom of your house and the many liberties I enjoyed in that fine library'.