CanLit lioness Margaret Laurence isn't lacking for attention, even 20 years after her death.

Nevertheless, a new work by Noelle Boughton is distinctive for a couple of reasons: it's short - just 200 pages - and it concentrates on a side of Laurence that's usually overlooked.

Margaret Laurence A Gift of Grace: A Spiritual Biography (Women's Press) explores the author's spirituality from her activism all the way to her interest in the anti-nuclear movement at the time of her death in 1987.

"The book is really about her spiritual journey," Boughton says of the Neepawa-born writer. "I wanted to write the book so as to find the essence of the woman.

"She's always been my favourite."

Boughton was born in Portage la Prairie and lived in Minnedosa, Tilson, and Boissevain and, like her subject, moved from her hometown to finish her education.

"I don't presume to compare myself to Margaret Laurence, but I saw connections," Boughton says.

The early years of Margaret Wemyss, as she was called before her marriage, were marked by tragedy. After the deaths of her mother and then, after his remarriage, her father, the future writer had the good fortune to be raised by her step-mother.

Stepmother Wemyss was an intelligent woman who briefly taught high school but never attended university because her old-fashioned father thought it unnecessary - a fate she made sure did not befall her step-daughter.

"It was serendipitous," Boughton says. "Her parents died and she was raised by a woman who had such an influence in her life. Her step-mom encouraged her writing. Her stop-mom told her to write what she knew, and Margaret Laurence only knew a small town.

"I loved how they used to recite poems to each other while doing their dishes.

"There isn't a lot of documentation of her early life," Boughton adds, "but the proclivities were already there if you read her writings in high school. She thought she had a responsibility. She got to intellectualize it when she got to United College."

Boughton writes that United College, (the founding institute of the University of Winnipeg), influenced Laurence in two important areas: literature and 'social gospel,' a liberal Protestant movement holding that social and economic improvement were just as important as salvation. Boughton traces these two themes in Laurence's life throughout Margaret Laurence.

After leaving the province in the late '40s, Laurence never returned to Manitoba, living in Ghana and England before finally settling in Lakefield, Ont. Her books, including The Stone Angel, A Jest of God and The Diviners, earned her a place in the pantheon of CanLit as well as two Governor General's awards.

But at the height of her fame, Laurence's works were attacked. In 1976, some parents in Lakefield objected to the presence of The Diviners in the town school. The controversy dragged on for months, only to flare up again a few years later. Boughton says Laurence was shocked by the attacks.

"She thought The Diviners was a Christian book," Boughton explains. "That's why she never wrote again. It devastated her. She felt quite betrayed. It was people from her own community."