One of the emblematic figures of the French avant-garde, Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob on October 25, 1894 in Nantes, the niece of the modernist writer Marcel Schwob and daughter of Maurice Schwob, who directed the journal Le Phare de la Loire. Educated in France and Britain, she started publishing in the Mercure de France under the pseudonym Claude Courlis, then, from 1917, as Claude Cahun, a sexually ambivalent pen name that reflected her provocative stance on gender identity.