The poem is read and performed by 8 actors, each of whom play a part. Usually several roles.
The poem contains 138 stanzas, spread over 38 pages. The length of the stanzas, which are not bound to fixed rhyme schemes, varies from 1 to 28 lines. Ten of them (for example the second and the fourth) have the format of prose. Apart from question marks, brackets and dashes, Boon uses almost no punctuation. He writes some words or lines in italics and his sporadic use of capital letters is idiosyncratic (for example, he writes proper names with a lower case letter). Once the text takes the form of a visual poem (stanza 29, page 11).
As far as can be ascertained, Louis Paul Boon wrote "De kleine Eva" in the autumn of 1953. In a conversation with Willem M. Roggeman in 1977, Boon says that "De kleine Eva" is based on a series of newspaper reports about a lust murder in Antwerp.
