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.

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.

William 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.

Only 19 years-old at the time, Khair-un-Nissa was abandoned by Russell, destroying her reputation among the Hyderabadi elite and was forced into exile, unable to prevent greedy relatives from taking over the valuable landed estates she had inherited from her father.

In 1812, William suffered a severe burn injury resulted in the amputation of one of his arms, and became reclusive thereafter, though he successfully graduated from Oxford University in 1820, married, and had three daughters before his early death in 1828.

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.

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.