Eva Smith / Daisy Renton: the person who is never in the room

Try to quote Eva Smith. Search An Inspector Calls from its first line to its last - and you will not find a single line she speaks. She never once walks on stage. So how do you write about the person the play is about, when she is never in the room?

If the story is new to you, An Inspector Calls: An overview tells all of it. This video looks at the girl it keeps offstage.

Eva Smith is offstage for the entire evening. Offstage means she is part of the story but never seen by the audience. That makes her a dramatic construct: a character a writer builds to do a job in the play, rather than a person the audience can meet. Everything the audience learns about her arrives second-hand, in somebody else's voice. The Inspector's voice comes first. He tells the family how she died, in plain, hard words. She'd swallowed a lot of strong disinfectant. Burnt her inside out, of course. The first thing the play tells you about her body is how it was destroyed. So Priestley starts her story at its end. Her life arrives as a list, again in the Inspector's voice. No work, no money coming in, and living in lodgings, with no relatives to help her, few friends, lonely, half-starved. A list has no voice of its own. Priestley hands you her life as a string of losses, spoken by somebody else. When an essay says Eva felt lonely, whose words is it really using? The Inspector's. Lonely is his word, in his account of her. She never says how she feels anywhere on stage.

Now, set the other descriptions of her side by side, and each one tells you more about the speaker than about Eva. Sheila remembers her from the shop. She was very pretty too - with big dark eyes. That is jealousy talking. Sheila saw a rival across the counter - and that is why she had her sacked. Gerald remembers the girl he met in the bar at the Palace. She looked young and fresh and charming and altogether out of place down here. Hold that line up against the story Gerald tells about himself. Who does young and fresh and charming tell you more about: Eva, or Gerald? Gerald. It is the girl a rescuer wants to find, and in his own account he is the rescuer. Sybil's version is the one that shut the committee's door on her. She was giving herself ridiculous airs. Airs are the manners of a class you do not belong to. Sybil cannot believe a girl like Eva has fine feelings, so her version shows Sybil's idea of class, not Eva's character. Priestley even lets Gerald wonder, in Act Three, whether it was the same girl at all, since the Inspector may have shown each of them a different photograph. If she can be several girls, she is not one person you could know. She is a place where many girls' stories meet.

Keeping her offstage does two jobs. An absent girl never makes a single choice in front of the audience that they could blame her for. And because she has no face, she can stand for others. The Inspector says so before he leaves. There are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us.

Offstage, she cannot be blamed for a choice nobody saw her make, and she cannot shrink to one unlucky girl. That is why Priestley never lets her into the room.

One examiner's report observes: A small number of candidates treat Eva Smith as an independent character in the play without recognising that as she never appears on the stage, she can only be treated as a dramatic construct. Treating her as an independent character means writing about her thoughts and choices as if you had watched them. And nobody in the audience ever did. The habit instead is to make Priestley the one acting: Priestley withholds her, Priestley lets others describe her, Priestley makes her stand for millions. But that does not make her matter less. A construct can still move you, and Priestley builds her to, so that the feeling spreads to the millions she stands for. One chain, five links: every link hands her on to the next. Five hands on one person who never gets to speak.

Two of the voices that describe her come back first, each with a word missing. The Inspector on how she died: burnt her inside... what? Out. The first fact the play gives about her body is the way it was destroyed. Here's Sybil's version, with its last word gone. She was giving herself ridiculous... What is the missing word at the end of Sybil's line? Airs. And the word tells you about Sybil's idea of class, never about Eva. A different voice now, one this video left out. Eric's verdict on her is that she was pretty and a good sport. What does pretty and a good sport tell you, and about whom? About Eric. He remembers what she was like to spend time with, not who she was, so it is one more version of her. Try to quote Eva Smith, and you still cannot. Every line about her belongs to somebody else.

Holding her as a construct while still feeling for her means this one has earned your thumbs-up. Where those two ideas still pull against each other, that pull is the point, and you are closer than it feels.

Next in the chapter: Secrets and mystery, what the play hides, and when it lets it out.

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