Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, seven years after Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. I have to admit that it was her almost dream-like beauty that first snared my attention. In her self-portraits there is something inscrutable about how she has constructed her presence for the camera. She is tranquil, slightly melancholy, never smiles, she is feminine in quite an old-fashioned way, but steely too. I want to keep on looking at Lee Miller's photographs of Lee Miller because there is always more to find. This is what makes her such a skilled artist.

But she is my hero because, as female narratives go, her life defies pigeonholing. What was she going to do with all that beauty and talent? She became a fashion model, working with the distinguished photographers of her day in New York, and then went off to study art in Europe. In Paris she worked with Man Ray, became his student, lover and model, collaborating on many extraordinary images for which she probably is not credited. She was publically modest about her own work but perhaps she didn't feel that way inside.

After Man Ray, she established her own studio and hung out with the girlfriends of the surrealist male artists of her generation. It is Lee's photographs of Nusch Eluard and Ady Fidelin that rescues them from their role as muses and mannikins.

In 1944 she became a war correspondent embedded with the US army, and followed the US infantry across a war-torn Europe. She was a fearless witness. Her photograph The Suicided Burgermeister's Daughter, Leipzig, Germany, 1945, deserves as prominent a place in art history as the more garlanded work of Joseph Beuys. As one of the few female combat journalists of the time, it was Miller, the same woman who played a decorative statue in Cocteau's film The Blood of a Poet, who photographed the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.

• Swimming Home by Deborah Levy is shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize.