MANY PEOPLE DREAD spending time with their in-laws and this is definitely the case now for bride Heidi Withers.

An email sent to the bride-to-be from her future mother-in-law, Carolyn Bourne, in which she is criticised for her eating habits, manners and choice of wedding venue, has gone viral across the Internet.

The stinging email attack – with the subject line “Your lack of manners” – contained some not-so-friendly advice for the 29-year-old Withers. Bourne wrote:

If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family, I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste.

To underline the issue, Bourne gave “a few examples” of Withers’ perceived “lack of manners”.

When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat – unless you are positively allergic to something.

You do not remark that you do not have enough food. You do not start before everyone else. You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.

There was more:

When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early. You fall in line with house norms.

You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public.

However, the future bride received tips not just on her manners but on her own character and personality:

You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why. No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity-style behaviour.

In an unsurprising exposition towards the end of the letter, Bourne makes it clear that she believes her stepson, Freddie, is marrying a girl from a different “class”.

I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.)

If your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.

To conclude her evaluation of her future daughter-in-law, Bourne, who is a florist in the South of England, wrote:

“One could be accused of thinking that Heidi Withers must be patting herself on the back for having caught a most eligible young man. I pity Freddie.”

It seems though that Carolyn Bourne thought she was doing Withers a favour by explaining “good manners” to her as they were so “obviously” absent.

Online Social Media has a screen grab of the mail – a warning for all future brides.

Withers received the damning email from her boyfriend’s stepmother following a weekend spent together in Devon, England.

The young woman may be ruing the decision to send it on to friends now as it soon became top news on the Internet. If the "Big Day" does arrive, its is going to be a tad awkward.