] And what do you think of the Abbey? Is the abbey everything it ought to be, or was Catherine being unrealistic in expecting a high prominence, dense woods, etc, etc,?

Catherine's image of an abbey, "massy walls of grey stone, rising amidst a grove af ancient oaks, with the last beams of the sun playing in beautiful splendor on its high Gothic windows" is actually a quotation from Udolpho, "The light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening."
She expected what any proper heroine should have expected. Barrett in The Heroine, or the Adventures of Cherubina" (1813; and called by JA "a delightful burlesque" in a letter) makes his heroine reject a modern house in such words, "Nice, new, neat and charming are the only adjectives applicable to it, whereas antique, sublime, terrible, picturesque and Gothic are the Epic epithets appropriate to my castello." So another heroine got nothing but neat and modern...