Phoebe Waller-Bridge has responded to criticism that Fleabag is “for posh girls”, insisting such arguments “undermine the story” and that people from a wide range of backgrounds relate to the show.

While the programme has been widely acclaimed, some observers have said its main character’s privileged circumstances mean it should not be seen as universally relatable. In April, a Guardian article argued that while Fleabag is “a work of undeniable genius”, those who did not recognise themselves in it were being drowned out.

“Fleabag is posh, and so is her creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge … and that’s totally fine,” the critic Ellen E Jones wrote. “[But] Fleabag is not ‘women’. She’s just that particular subsection who already make up the majority of women in public life, anyway.”

Asked what her reaction was when people describe her as being privileged, Waller-Bridge said it was “absolutely probably true” that many people do not have the same opportunities she did to be able to make “their Fleabag”.

But she took umbrage with criticism about the substance of her work as related to her background.

“To criticise a story on the basis of where the author had come from, or how privileged the author is, undermines the story,” she told the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day.

“I’ve never pretended that I’m not from a privileged position, I really know that I am … I was perfectly set up to have success in the world.

“I suppose some of the criticism is that it was ‘just for posh girls’ and what I loved was that people were sending me photos of tweets ... There was one guy saying ‘I’m a disabled 42-year-old man living in Hull and I am Fleabag’. And it was like ‘Yes mate!’ because that’s always what I’m striving for … That people feel like it is a human story.”

Waller-Bridge was educated at private schools and descends from titled nobility on both sides of her family. She also attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, one of the most prestigious such institutions in the UK.

However, she said she had “really, really worked for it” and that her privilege in itself had not created Fleabag, though she conceded the tale was told through the prism of a middle-class family.

“I created Fleabag, but from a point of place in my life where I was able to sit and write, and I was able to take the time, and I was around people who could support that,” said Waller-Bridge, who also wrote Killing Eve.

“I like to think that whatever life I’d lived, wherever I’d been born or brought up, I would still have written if I had been given the encouragement, and actually that’s the thing that I care about, encouraging people to do it.”