Roman à clef

A roman à clef or roman à clé (French for "novel with a key") is a novel describing real-life events behind a facade of fiction. The "key", not present in the text, is the correspondence between events and characters in the novel and events and characters in real life. They are often satirical.

Romans à clefs are generally written to report inside information on scandals without giving rise to charges of libel. They also give the author the opportunity to turn the tale the way the author would like it to have gone.

Some notable romans à clefs:

• Virtually all of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785 - 1866) presuppose a knowledge of English intellectuals and currents of thought of the time.
• Glenarvon[?] (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb which chronicles her affair with Lord Byron (thinly disguised as the title character).
• Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925) by Aldous Huxley are all satires of contemporary events.
• Point Counter Point (1928) by Huxley includes easily detected portraits of Huxley's friends D.H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry[?].
• Primary Colors (1996), about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, published anonymously but later confirmed to have been written by Joe Klein[?].

Related topics

• Autobiographical novel
• Literary technique