Short answers, pulled from the story.
Syon Abbey was a dual monastery of men and women of the Bridgettine Order, though it was governed only by abbesses throughout its existence. It stood on the left bank of the River Thames in the parish of Isleworth, Middlesex, and was the wealthiest religious house in England at the time of the dissolution.
Syon Abbey was founded in 1415. King Henry V laid the first stone on the 22nd of February 1415, and the founding charter was signed at Westminster on the 3rd of March 1415.
Syon Abbey stood on the left, or Middlesex, bank of the River Thames in the parish of Isleworth, on or near the site of the present Georgian mansion of Syon House. That site is now in the London Borough of Hounslow.
Henry VIII made Syon an object of special vengeance because of the Syon monk Richard Reynolds, who had facilitated a meeting between Sir Thomas More and the mystic Elizabeth Barton that fed More's opposition to the king. Reynolds was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on the 4th of May 1535 for denying the king's supremacy, and the monastery surrendered to the king's commissioners in 1539.
Only eight women ever held the office of abbess at Syon Abbey: Matilda Newton, Joan North, Maud Muston, Margaret Ashby, Elizabeth Muston, Elizabeth Gibbs, Constance Browne, and Agnes Jordan. Agnes Jordan, the last pre-Reformation abbess, served from 1520-1539 and died on the 29th of January 1546.
After the 1539 dissolution, the expelled community exiled itself to the Netherlands rather than disbanding, and was briefly recalled to Syon during the reign of Queen Mary I in 1553. It was dissolved again under Elizabeth I in 1558 and settled in Lisbon, Portugal by 1594, before finally returning to England in 1861 and closing for good in 2011.