The Good Companions The Good Companions The Good Companions is a novel by the English author J. B. Priestley. Written in 1929 (in Deal, Kent), it focuses on the trials and tribulations of a concert party in England between World War I and World War II. It is arguably Priestley's most famous novel, and the work which established him as a national figure. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was adapted twice into film. The novel is written in picaresque style, and opens with the middle aged, discontented Jess Oakroyd in the fictional Yorkshire town of Bruddersford. He opts to
An Inspector Calls Eva Smith may not have been the same person but rather a collective personification of all the different working-class women that the family had exploited, invented by Goole to make the family feel guilty. Yet the final phone call, announcing that a police inspector is shortly to arrive at the Birlings' house to investigate the suicide of a young girl, leaves open the possibility that Eva Smith really did exist after all. Arthur Birling is described as "a heavy-looking, rather portentous man in his middle fifties", husband of Sybil, and father of Sheila and Eric Birling. He represents the capitalist