Given O'Brien's background, it was perhaps inevitable that she become an intellectually active, outspoken, and prolific novelist, playwright, and essayist. Born on 3 December 1897, she was one of the nine children of Thomas O'Brien, a wealthy and quick-witted breeder of hunter and harness thoroughbreds, and Katherine "Katty" Thornhill O'Brien, an outgoing, generous woman who died when Kate O'Brien was a young child. She seems to have inherited from her parents not only wit and sensibility but the energy necessary to capture her observations in art. Boru House, Limerick, her childhood home and the Mellick of her fiction, was the scene of tremendous gaiety and great sorrow. There were many children about, but their mother died early and their father followed her only a little more than a decade later in 1916. O'Brien's autobiographical sketch Presentation Parlour (1963) introduces the aunts who guided Boru House's children. Two of the aunts lived in Limerick's Presentation Convent, and in the convent parlor, surrounded by her family, O'Brien observed and made lengthy cerebral notes on human feeling, later writing that her childhood and youth seemed "a kind of long ballet of the smile and the tear, a serialized ballet, choreographed impromptu by the unconscious of all performers."
After being educated in her birthplace's Laurel Hill Convent, O'Brien made a point of confronting the world.
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