British Accent Shadowing | Lady Chatterley’s Lover Part 1 | RP Pronunciation Practice Reading Aloud

Hello and welcome to British Accent Shadowing. I’m Ashley Howard,

a UK voice coach and accent specialist. Today we’re working with an extract from

Lady Chatterley’s Lover — a great passage for developing RP pronunciation, connected speech,

and natural intonation and rhythm. Our focus today is the schwa,

the most common vowel in British English. If you’d like a deeper explanation, I’ve linked

a dedicated schwa tutorial in the description. I’ll read the passage once at a natural RP pace,

and then we’ll go line by line so you can shadow and repeat after me.

You can also download the free PDF of today’s text with vocabulary notes below.

Let’s begin. Ours is essentially a tragic age,

so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins,

we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work:

there is no smooth road now into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've

got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. This was more or less Constance Chatterley's

position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she

had realised that one must live and learn. She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917,

when he was home for a month on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders:

to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits. Constance,

his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was twenty-nine.

His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to grow together

again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands. Then he was pronounced a cure, and could

return to life again, with the lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.

This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall,

the family "seat." His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was

Lady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of

the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed.

Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever,

knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands

to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could. He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself

about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could drive

himself slowly round the garden and into the fine melancholy park, of which he was really so proud,

though he pretended to be flippant about it. Having suffered so much, the capacity for

suffering had to some extent left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might

say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes.

His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed,

and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful

look, the slight vacancy of a cripple. He had so very nearly lost his life, that

what remained was wonderfully precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes,

how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much hurt that something

inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.