Roman à clef (French for "novel with a key") is a work of prose fiction in which the author expects the knowing reader to identify, despite their altered names, actual people of the time. The mode was begun in seventeenth-century France with novels such as Madeleine de Scudéry's Le Grand Cyrus (1649-53). An English example is Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818), whose characters are entertaining caricatures of such contemporary literary figures as Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. A later instance is Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928), in which we find, under fictional names, well-known English people of the 1920s such as the novelist D. H. Lawrence, the critic Middleton Murry, and the right-wing political extremist Oswald Mosely.

From A Glossary of Literary Terms