(French; " novel with a key ")
Novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying identifiable people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters.
The tradition dates to 17th-century France, when members of aristocratic literary coteries included in their historical romances representations of well-known figures in the court of Louis XIV . A more recent example is W. Somerset Maugham 's Cakes and Ale (1930), widely held to portray Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole . A more common type of roman à clef is one in which the disguised characters are easily recognized only by a few insiders, as in Simone de Beauvoir 's The Mandarins (1954).