Colette began writing Break of Day in her early fifties, at Saint-Tropez on the Côte d'Azur, where she had bought a small house after the breakup of her second marriage. The novel's theme—the renunciation of love and the return to an independent existence supported and enriched by the beauty and peace of nature—grows out of Colette's own period of self-assessment in the middle of her life. A collection of subtle reflections about love and life, it is among her most thoughtful and stylistically bold works.