The Mysteries of Glass by Sue Gee

I like all Sue Gee's novels but this is my favourite, just right for a wintry evening and frost at midnight.
It is 1860 and Richard Allen takes up his post in a remote country parish in Herefordshire. An amiable, devout young man and son of a clergyman, he finds parish life claustrophobic until he falls in love with an unhappily married woman who returns his love. Dramatic consequences follow; Victorian society is scandalised but true love knows no shame. Richard and Susannah are good people who deserve to find happiness in this fleeting world despite the hypocrisy surrounding them.
Gee's descriptions of the countryside are exquisite, like extracts from Kilvert's diary of the same period.
The lantern swung before them, shining on frozen ruts of earth, on bank and frosty hedgerow.

In the morning the window was thick with frost. Downstairs there was ice on every pane and the shutters in the snug cloaked a passage of freezing air. The world was yet in darkness: for a moment he felt like a ghost, returned to an unlit empty house, with no one to hear his voice or have any sense of his presence here at all.

Palm Sunday, 1861. The woods filled with paper-white anemones; catkins swaying over the stream; the birds a concert hall. The lambs and the ewes cried for one another long after dark, and Richard was woken by them long before the dawn.

And so, as the firelight played upon them, they went on gazing at each other's eyes, searching, finding, while outside the cold April wind stirred the trees, and across the darkening highway the house behind the laurels now was silent.