Dictionary

roman à clef en · NOUN

Borrowed from French roman à clef (literally “novel with a key”).

A piece of fiction, especially a novel, describing real-life people or events.
- However, I would argue that this feature of the roman à clef need not be characterized as an impediment to interpretation. If the layered address contained in novels that encrypt references to the 'real' is acknowledged as itself a characteristic […] 2011, S. Nair, Secrecy and Sapphic Modernism: Writing Romans à Clef Between the Wars, Springer, →ISBN, page 23:
- In the end, the fragmentary nature of the text and Dora's abrupt decision to terminate her treatment indicate that as a narrative technology, the roman à clef fails. This owes less to the particulars of the individual case, however, than to Freud's […] 2009, Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 57:
- I want to emphasize that in this respect my account of romance differs substantially from both Annabel Patterson's argument that the primary purpose of roman à clef in early modern England was to avoid censorship and Michael McKeon's […] 2007, A. Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century English Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics, Springer, →ISBN, page 9:

Spelling	Features	Labels	Source
romans à clef	Number=Plur		lexicographic