This article is dedicated to the artistic world of A. Murdoch. In Murdoch's work, the narrative tradition of English prose of the XIX century proves its continuity and productivity. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James are no less close to this artist than James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. For more than thirty years of her work, her novel has undergone stylistic and aesthetic complication. It originated as a novel of ideas and remains so to this day. But in the complex of the writer's ideas, ethical ones were increasingly put forward in the first place. Despite the many abstractions and limitations, mainly of a social nature, it is the consistent search for goodness, a positive hero, true moral values in the cruel and complex modern world that distinguishes Murdoch and puts her in a special, high place among the philosophical novelists of England.