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[考研英语] 考研英语阅读理解精读五十四 　　Tracy Borman can tell a good story. Admittedly, her subject is a gift. But Henrietta Howard, mistress to George II, lived in the midst of a large cast of characters, many of them entangled in the complicated politics of 18th-century court life, and Ms Borman handles them and their world with aplomb. 　　Though the 18th century is called the Age of Reason, it was anything but. Henrietta was born in 1689, a year after the balance of power in Britain shifted from monarch to Parliament. But this did nothing to shift the tyranny of men over women, and Henriettas life was largely shaped by violent and unreasonable men.When she was eight, her father, the profligate and choleric squire of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, challenged a neighbour to a duel for impugning his valour. He was killed for his pains, leaving a wife, eight children and a pile of debts. Eight years later, perhaps hoping to help her now motherless siblings, Henrietta released her dowry money by marrying a cousin, Charles Howard, 14 years her senior. 　　It was a disaster. Charles turned out to be a compulsive gambler and wife-beater, and their lives descended into lodging-house flits and near-starvation. Then, aged 25, Henrietta made her own astonishing gamble. In 1714, when Queen Anne lay dying, she took herself and Charles off to Hanover, where George Louis, heir presumptive to the English throne, held court. There she joined throngs of other hopefuls, all jockeying for the notice either of George Louis, or his son, George Augustus, or his daughter-in-law, Caroline. 　　Henriettas gamble paid off, though frying pans and fires come to mind. Her appointment as Woman of the Bedchamber to Princess Caroline meant long days of tedious and exacting ceremony, such as holding her mistresss wash basin on bended knee, a point that Caroline spitefully insisted on when Henrietta became her husbands mistress. Not that that was much comfort either. The man was a boor, and dull with it. In any case,