Dorothea Tanning didn’t limit herself to one form of artistic expression: she painted, sculpted, wrote poetry, memoir and fiction, and it was my mother (who has also never settled on one art form) who introduced me to her. For years we’ve both been fascinated by a painting in Tate Modern: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943). Two girls stand on the landing of what could be a hotel – there are room numbers on the doors – looking as though they have had a long, hard fight with the giant sunflower that lies, broken, in the centre of the picture. Their clothes are dishevelled; one girl’s hair floats up into the air and the other’s seems to emerge from behind the mask of her face; there is a hint of sexual awakening, and of decay. At the end of the corridor a door is ajar, a bright yellow light spilling on to the carpet.

It’s difficult to know exactly what you are supposed to feel. Fear? Despair? Hilarity? Tanning does sometimes seem to be poking fun at the society she lives in, especially where women’s roles are concerned. Like many artistic women she was somewhat eclipsed by her more famous painter husband, Max Ernst, and later said her marriage “did stain my work indelibly”. In the painting Some Roses and Their Phantoms, from 1952, she plays with similar domestic/uncanny juxtapositions – a table spread with a beautiful white cloth shows strange forms, like the dried or twisted remnants of plants, placed where cups and a coffee pot should be. Crumpled and shadowed, they become insect- or monster-like.

I adore this painting, and have found many of Tanning’s pictures are similarly beautiful and frightening, playing as they do with familiar, even cosy spaces by adding strange and disturbing elements. I especially love A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today (1944), which references one of my favourite writers – that master of 18th-century gothic romance, Ann Radcliffe.

• Emma Healey won the Costa first novel award last week for Elizabeth Is Missing.