11 Facts About Kitty Kirkpatrick

Katherine Aurora "Kitty" Kirkpatrick was a British woman of Anglo-Indian descent best known as a muse of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.

Kitty Kirkpatrick met Carlyle and served as his muse for several of his novels.

Kitty Kirkpatrick's story has been the subject of renewed interest by 21st-century historians, most notable William Dalrymple.

Kitty Kirkpatrick was born on 9 April 1802, in the city of Hyderabad which was located in the Hyderabad Deccan, a large principality in the southern Indian subcontinent under British paramountcy.

Kitty Kirkpatrick's mother, Khair-un-Nissa, was a Hyderabadi noblewoman and a Sayyida, a lineal descendant of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, whose grandfather served as the prime minister of Hyderabad.

Kitty Kirkpatrick was initially named Noor un-Nissa, Sahib Begum and was raised alongside her brother William in the mansion her father built, living in the zenana with her mother and maternal grandmother.

William Kitty Kirkpatrick, who had needed to retire to England mid-career due to increasingly poor health, had arranged for James to step into his prestigious position as Resident at Hyderabad.

Into adulthood Kitty became known for her attractiveness, and in 1822, while staying with the Bullers, she met the Scottish philosopher and historian, Thomas Carlyle, who was then employed as the Buller children's tutor and who swiftly became infatuated with Kirkpatrick.

On 21 November 1829, Kitty Kirkpatrick married James Winslowe Phillipps, a British Army officer in the 7th Hussars Regiment, and a member of the Kennaway family, which had Indian connections.

However, with the help of Henry Russell, her father's former assistant and her mother's ex-lover, Kitty Kirkpatrick was able to re-establish contact with her maternal grandmother after almost four decades of separation.

Kitty Kirkpatrick's letters make it clear that despite leaving India and her mother at such a young age, she still retained vivid memories of it:.