To the End of the World by WHITE, Helen C - 1939

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939. Hardcover. 8vo. Blue cloth with gilt lettering, pictorial dust jacket. 675pp. Very good/very good. Jacket lightly edgeworn, with chips at tail of faintly-sunned spine. Quite handsome and tight first edition of White's third novel, a hefty historical fiction set a decade prior to the French Revolution in the Abbey of Cluny. White signs and inscribes the front flyleaf in black ink in her tiny script to, fittingly, a Catholic priest: "All good wishes / To Father Schroeder / Helen C. White." Karl G. Schroeder (1910-99) was an admirer of Helen and her sister Olive's novels and a long-time (1938-94) English professor known for his Chaucer and Shakespeare courses at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. White (1896-1967) was the influential University of Wisconsin professor, novelist and literary critic -- first female full professor in their College of Letters and Science, first female president of the University Club, first female elected president of the American Association of University Professors, etc., etc. Her half dozen novels are well-regarded historical fiction with religious themes.