We often think of our imagination as consisting of drifting ideas and daydreams. But for novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, this view of imagination is radically mistaken. Imagination is not a way to escape the world but the route by which we become positive agents within the world. In this article, Miles Leeson applies Murdoch’s distinction between imagination and fantasy to Murdoch’s own literary work and argues that such a distinction is crucial for our ethical lives.