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Roman a Clef (French ‘novel with a key’) is a novel that represents events and characters under the disguise of fictional characters. The tradition goes back to 17th century France, when fashionable members of the aristocratic literary coteries, such as Mlle de Scudery, enlivened their historical romances by including in them fictional representations of well-known figures in the court of Louis XIV. For the sake of the fullest appreciation of a work of fiction, it is necessary for the reader to consult the real-life personages and events that inspired it. In such cases a roman a clef novel seems a very well acclaiming genre. In a general sense, every work of literary art requires a key or clue to the artist’s preoccupations (the jail in Dickens; the mysterious tyrants in Kafka, both leading back to the author’s own father), but the true roman a clef is more particular in its disguised references.
Chaucer’s Nuns Priest’s Tale has puzzling naturalistic details that can be cleared up only by referring the poem to an assassination plot in which the Earl of Bolingbroke was involved. Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) make total sense only when their hidden historical content is disclosed. These, of course, are not true novels, but they serve to indicate a literary purpose that is not primarily aesthetic. Lawrence’s Aarons Rod requires a knowledge of the author’s personal enmities, and to understand Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point fully one must know, for instance, that the character of Mark Rampion is D.H. Lawrence himself and that of Denis Burlap is the critic John Middleton Murry. Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu becomes a richer literary experience when the author’s social milieu is explored, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has so many personal references that it may be called the most massive roman a clef ever written. In the 20th century, Somerset Maugham’s Moon and Sixpence (1919) is thought to be related to the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, and his Cakes and Ale (1930) is said to contain caricatures of the novelists Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Another common type of roman a clef is Simone de Beauvoir’s Mandarins (1954), in which the disguised characters are immediately recognizable only to a small circle of insiders.