Eva Smith / Daisy Renton

Eva Smith dies by suicide, drinking disinfectant shortly before the play's action begins. Her death is never shown on stage; instead, Inspector Goole arrives at the Birling household to expose how each family member contributed to her destruction. Priestley withholds the death scene deliberately, forcing the audience to understand it as the cumulative result of many smaller cruelties rather than a single dramatic event.

Eva Smith uses the alias Daisy Renton during her time with Gerald Croft. Priestley gives the names precise symbolic weight: 'Eva Smith' links her to universality — Eve as everywoman, Smith as the most common English surname — marking her as a representative of millions of exploited workers. 'Daisy Renton' signals transformation under male patronage, a softer identity adopted to suit the man who temporarily sheltered her.

Priestley constructs Eva's destruction as a chain of harm rather than the fault of one person, but he frames Sybil Birling as the most culpable. Sybil chairs the charitable committee that denies Eva — pregnant and destitute — any aid, partly out of class contempt and partly because Eva had used the Birling name. This refusal removes Eva's last remaining option and seals her fate.

Gerald rescues Eva — by then calling herself Daisy Renton — from unwanted advances at the Palace Bar, installs her in a friend's flat, and begins an affair with her. He describes her as 'very pretty' and 'warm-hearted,' and this period is the only one in Eva's life recounted in warm terms. Gerald ends the relationship when it becomes inconvenient, leaving her more isolated than before.

Eva refuses the money because she discovers Eric stole it from Arthur Birling's office. Even while pregnant and destitute, she rejects the funds on moral grounds rather than compromise her integrity. Priestley uses this detail to establish Eva as the play's most ethically consistent figure, granting the greatest moral clarity to the character with the least social power.

Priestley keeps Eva offstage to show how thoroughly the comfortable classes erase people like her from sight. Her existence is constructed entirely from the testimonies of the Birlings and Gerald, filtered through Inspector Goole's questioning. This absence becomes a formal argument: a woman central to every scene of the play can only exist as testimony filtered through those who held power over her.

No lines from Goole about Eva Smith are recorded verbatim in the provided material, but his closing speech links her individual fate to 'millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths,' transforming her death into a political indictment of the entire social order. He also warns of 'fire and blood and anguish' if society ignores its collective responsibility — making Eva's story an explicit prophecy directed at the audience.

Sheila uses her family's influence to have Eva dismissed from Milward's, motivated by petty jealousy over a look she interpreted as mockery — a trivial grievance that costs Eva her livelihood. The relationship reveals how class resentment compounds economic vulnerability, allowing the privileged to inflict serious harm on a whim. Crucially, Sheila's sustained remorse afterwards marks her as capable of moral growth, in contrast to her parents.