Sheila is the Birlings' eldest child, and engaged to Gerald. She got Eva sacked from a shop job because Eva laughed at how she looked in a hat.
- 'And so you used the power you had, as a daughter of a good customer and also of a man well-known in the town, to punish the girl just because she made you feel like that?' (24)
- Her views change as the play progresses. When she hears what her father has done to Eva, she says 'but these girls aren't cheap labour - they're people' (19)
- As the play progresses and the Inspector reveals their complicity with Eva's death, Sheila gets more and more agitated, and her parents call her 'hysterical.' (48)
- At the end she repeats the words of the Inspector's last speech - 'fire and blood and anguish' (71), and unlike the elder Birlings is genuinely changed by the night's events.
