The album is an intimate song cycle centred on the romantic break-up of frontman Bobby Wratten and Anne Mari Davies, his former bandmate in the Field Mice and Northern Picture Library.

In the words of band biographer Michael Hill, "[Wratten] found himself unable to commit his feelings onto tape after giving it a couple of unsuccessful tries.

[6] Davies did however make a guest appearance on Trembling Blue Stars' second album Lips That Taste of Tears (1998), which lyrically continues the heartbreak themes of Her Handwriting.

"[1] The melancholic album incorporates pastoral, dreamy guitars and a muted ambient atmosphere, with "lush" electronics that have been compared to Saint Etienne.

"[5] The seven-minute "Abba on the Jukebox" contains chintzy drum machine beats, a brief, high-toned guitar phrase and sighing backing vocals, with lyrics solely comprising a list of memories spent with a partner.

Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger said of the song's lyrics: "What Rob Wratten discovered with the Field Mice is that if you say something plainly enough, your words work harder and you can give the most ordinary phrases the emotional weight of novels.

[…] What he discovered with 'Abba on the Jukebox' is that you didn’t even have to go that far – what makes this song so poignant is that the loss between the lines, the knowledge that these things he's describing can't ever return or be remade, goes unmentioned.

The exquisitely simple package offered no photographs, production credits or information about where and when it was made, just a swirl of black and white drawings that seemed primitively symbolic, like something out of a vintage cinematic dream sequence.

[4] Vox compared the album's mood to Massive Attack's collaborations with Tracy Thorn, and hailed the album as one "with which to grow old and sad gracefully," while Mike Sutherland of the NME wrote that "Wratten's trademark blend of pastoral guitars and lush, Saint Etienne-esque electronics is fine-tuned to near perfection and even the hardest hearts find themselves whispering along to 'What Can I Say To Change Your Heart?'.

[11] "Abba on the Jukebox" was ranked number 19 in the 1996 edition of John Peel's Festive Fifty, an annual listeners' poll of the best songs of the year,[12] and in 1999, Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger ranked it at number 15 in his list of the "Top 100 Singles of the 90s,"[13] who called it "a coming-to-terms: the song's litany of places, snapshot moments and tiny private actions is a way to map out a love by looking at its edges, to understand the shape of something too bright and raw for direct inspection.

"[7] The album has been seen as influential; Edwards reflected that, "[a]lways ahead of his time, [Wratton] was bringing together indie pop and electronic music before it was cool to do so,"[1] while Hill posed Give Up (2003) by The Postal Service as a "direct descendant" of Her Handwriting.