BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Hello, I'm Emma Barnett and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4.

Let's do this thing called Monday together, shall we?

On today's programme, as Italy prepares for its first female prime minister, what could

Georgia Maloney mean for Italian women and why has her formula seemingly won her the top

job?

And turning to the Conservative woman running the UK, Liz Truss, after the pound tanked,

hitting a record low as the global market, reacted to the biggest tax cuts in this country

in 50 years.

How will Trussonomics, as it's being called, add up and crucially, affect you?

But in the midst of these headlines and new political norms, you might be listening to

this in pain, or dealing with an illness that refuses to leave you alone, no matter what

medicine you chuck at it.

On Friday, the news broke of the author, Dame Hillary Mantell's death at the age of 70,

after suffering a stroke.

Her literary legacy was huge, but a large part of why the author of the best-selling

wolf-hull trilogy even picked her career was to have a job that she could control living

with in severe pain and fatigue caused by the chronic condition endometriosis.

Some of her lesser-known writing, but arguably her most powerful, was about the female body

and how to live in it in pain.

Sometimes the touted cures hurt her more than the disease they were meant to be helping.

The line that always stays with me from her dispatches on the frontlines of pain and ill

...