Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pandora was created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus, as described by Hesiod. Multiple gods contributed gifts to her making, including Athena, Aphrodite, and Hermes, who named her Pandora meaning "all-gift" because every god on Olympus gave her something.
According to Hesiod's Works and Days, Pandora's jar contained countless plagues. When she scattered the contents, the earth and sea became full of evils. Only Hope, called Elpis, remained trapped inside under the jar's rim, stopped there by the will of Zeus.
The mistranslation is attributed to the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who rendered the Greek word pithos as the Latin pyxis, meaning box, rather than the correct meaning of a large storage jar. The phrase "Pandora's box" has endured ever since.
In Hesiod's Works and Days, Pandora's name means "all-gifted", referring to the gifts each Olympian god gave her. However, classics scholars have argued the name more properly means "all-giving", reflecting an older tradition in which Pandora was a generous earth goddess rather than a punishing instrument.
Church Fathers established a theological parallel between Pandora and Eve because both are the first woman in their respective traditions and both preside over a fall from ease to suffering brought on by divine punishment. Jean Cousin the Elder's 1550 painting Eva Prima Pandora depicted a single figure combining attributes of both women.
Anesidora, meaning "she who sends up gifts", is attested on a white-ground kylix dated to around 460 BCE in the British Museum, where it is written above a figure of Pandora being finished by Hephaestus and Athena. The epithet is more commonly applied to Gaea or Demeter, and scholars cite it as evidence that Pandora was originally an earth goddess before Hesiod reframed her as a mortal instrument of punishment.