“”Recently came across a letter, written by my grandmother as a young woman in the 1920s. Her handwriting was simply beautiful.””
I never knew any of my grandparents but an aunt sent me the original piece of paper listing family members written by her mother and like you say, it was amazingly beautiful - recapping the ancestry of the folks from Bristol, England..We did have penmanship in school and anyone as old as I am today still writes beautifully but there was something special about the old handwritten documents - they didn’t have modern pens..
Well, before the Flood, when I learned how to write script in school, we used a straight pen ( dip pen ) and had an inkwell on our desks.And besides practicing in school, we had to do a page of handwriting for homework, every night, plus homework in other subjects. :-)