Kitty Kirkpatrick

Katherine Aurora "Kitty" Kirkpatrick (9 April 1802 – 2 March 1889) was a British woman of Anglo-Indian descent best known as a muse of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Born in India to a British father and Princess Khair-un-Nissa of Hyderabad, who was likely of Persian descent, Kirkpatrick moved to England at a young age. She met Carlyle and served as his muse for several of his novels. Kirkpatrick's story has been the subject of renewed interest by 21st-century historians, most notable William Dalrymple.

Biography

Early life

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. Her father, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, was the East India Company Resident in Hyderabad and a colonel in the Presidency armies. Her 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. They never returned to India, nor did any members of their maternal family come to England to visit them.

James Kirkpatrick died on 15 October 1805, around 8 months after Kitty and William had left India. Carlyle would later use Kitty as the basis for the Calypso-like Blumine in his novel Sartor Resartus and his memoirs, written many decades later, wrote a pen portrait of Kitty, describing her as:

On 21 November 1829, Kitty married James Winslowe Phillipps (1802–1859), a British Army officer in the 7th Hussars Regiment, and a member of the Kennaway family, which also had Indian connections. It was evidently a happy marriage, Kirkpatrick and Phillipps went on to have seven children, of whom four survived to adulthood: Mary Augusta (1830–1909), John James (b. 1834), Emily Georgina (b. 1835), and Bertha Elizabeth (1840–1875).

Renewed contact with India Kirkpatrick's paternal family had long forbidden her from maintaining any contact with her family in India. However, with the help of Henry Russell, her father's former assistant and her mother's ex-lover, Kirkpatrick was able to re-establish contact with her maternal grandmother after almost four decades of separation. Although they were never physically re-united, the two women were correspondents on a regular and often emotional basis for six years.

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: