Jessie Burton, whose debut novel The Miniaturist was named Waterstones book of the year on Monday, has spoken of her frustration that “strong women” are still considered a novelty in fiction.

Burton’s delicately woven tale of 17th-century Amsterdam is one of the most successful novels of the year. It fought off competition from Richard Flanagan’s Booker prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to win the bookseller’s award.

Burton said she was “wonderfully and astonishingly overwhelmed” by the response to her novel. But she said she was surprised by the emphasis on the female characters in her book, who repeatedly defy the subservient expectations of the period in which it is set.

“I was not conscious of having a strong female lead, it was just came naturally,” she said. “But I’ve always struggled with this notion of a ‘strong female’, because all the females I know in my life are strong, and it’s a term that suggests that by default they would be weak and they are extra-special as a result. Very few male novelists get asked: ‘You’ve put some really strong males in your book, why is that?’ Or: ‘You’ve got a lot of men in your book’.”

Set in 1688, the protagonist of The Miniaturist is 18-year-old Nella Oortman, a country girl who marries Johannes Brandt, a wealthy Dutch merchant trader twice her age. The story revolves around a miniature replica of their cloistered, controlled home given to Nella as a wedding gift. The idea came to Burton in 2009 when she was inspired by an intricate doll’s house that sits in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

As well as Nella, oOther female characters that sit at the heart of the story include her sister-in-law Marin, her servant Cordelia and the illusive miniaturist herself.

“For me, it was natural to create these women, all of whom are different and none of whom are perfect but who are also capable of great kindness and bravery and love,” said Burton. “Every time I put pen to paper, a woman comes out.”

She said that much of the contention she had encountered with The Miniaturist centred on the supposedly inauthentic concept of having several strong females in a book set in a time when a woman’s realm was almost entirely domestic. It was an allegation, said Burton, that she really took issue with.

“It’s been one of the biggest debates around the book, is it too contemporary?” she said. “It’s like the world is suddenly full of 17th century experts about what women may or may not have thought. My research had shown that women at the time had a mobility, certainly rich women, that they would not have had 100 years previously – women would often take over their dead husband’s businesses and could even join certain guilds. It was something I wanted to explore.”

Even though Burton once herself referred to the The Miniaturist as “golden age feminist fiction”, she said she looked forward to the day when “the book is not defined by that, just because there are lots of female protagonists.”

“I certainly don’t take issue with it being called a feminist book,” she added. “We’ve still got a long way to go for equal representation for women in business and in the media and the debate has to keep going. And while some people say it’s a loaded term, I don’t think it has frightened off any male readers I know. In fact I’ve had quite a few men getting in touch to tell me how much they’ve loved the book, people I would never have expected to pick it up.”

Burton, 30, was an actress before she turned to writing, and wrote most of The Miniaturist whilst balancing her sporadic appearances on stage and various temping jobs in the City. Much of the book was penned in what she called a slow and often laborious process over three years, typing up a few paragraphs on the commute to work, reading 17th-century Dutch recipe books on her weekends, and secretly redrafting chapters while working as a PA.

It was an exhausting gamble that paid off. The Miniaturist earned Burton an impressive six-figure advance after 11 publishers desperately bid for her book and it went straight to the top of the bestseller lists the fastest-selling debut since EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

The author has already begun work on her second novel, titled Belonging, which is set between 1930s Spanish Civil War and the London art scene of the 1960s. It tells the story of a promising artist who goes missing in battle in 1937 and whose works re-emerge on the London art market 30 years later.

Yet despite the global success of The Miniatures, Burton said throwing herself fully into another book was a deeply daunting prospect, a view she also voiced on a recent blogpost on her website.

“Every time I write a sentence, tiny weights seem to latch, slipping over words like lumpen clogs across the page, ungainly, worrisome,” she wrote. “Nothing is good enough. It will never be good enough. It is completely terrifying.”