roman à clef
noun
Did you know?
Unlock the fiction, open the door and see the very real people behind it, wrote Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News (March 19, 1998). That can be easily done when a roman à clef uses fictitious names to present thinly veiled depictions of well-known people or events. But what if only a few insiders know the real people or incidents? In the 1800s, such romans a clef sometimes included a key, a list matching fictional characters with their real-life counterparts, that helped readers recognize the players. Such keys made "roman a clef" (from a French phrase meaning "a novel with a key") an apt term for such works. Nowadays, there are no published keys in a roman à clef - merely veiled (or sometimes blatant) references that connect fact with fiction.
Examples of roman à clef in a Sentence
Greg Evans, Deadline, 2 Oct. 2024
Reader, that salad dressing is from Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s roman a clef about her messy divorce from Carl Bernstein.
—Mark Peikert, Town & Country, 21 Oct. 2022
Plath’s roman a clef plops you into the 1950s, when women’s aspirations were chillingly constrained, partly by the kill switch of their sexuality.
—BostonGlobe.com, 29 July 2022
Weisberger had spent time as Wintour’s personal assistant and many saw her novel as a roman a clef, with names changed hardly to protect the not-so-innocent.
—Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 18 Sep. 2019
Neither combatant is mentioned in the novel; this is no roman a clef with characters standing in for them.
—Susan Page, USA TODAY, 3 June 2018
Cite this Entry
“Roman à clef.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/roman%20%C3%A0%20clef. Accessed 4 May. 2025.
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