Roman à clef

Rarity: Uncommon

A topic a little better known than average, read and translated beyond its own country.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Notion

Domain

Arts and letters

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

A roman à clef ( roh-MON ə KLAY; French: [ʁɔmɑ̃n‿a kle]; lit. 'novel with a key') is a novel about real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people and the "key" is the relationship between the non-fiction and the fiction.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Roman à clef”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: Anonymous, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.