In Notebook 2 – often called the ‘Urewera Notebook’ – Katherine Mansfield quotes the end of Gustave Flaubert's July 1852 letter to his best friend, Maxime du Camp. She copied the phrase ‘Nous ne suivons plus la même route, nous ne naviguons plus dans la même nacelle. Moi je ne cherche pas le port, mais la haute mer.’ Flaubert follows these lines with one short, pithy phrase which Mansfield did not reproduce in her notebook but which must have resonated with how she viewed her position in 1908 as she planned to embark on an artistic career: ‘If I am shipwrecked, you have my permission not to mourn.’ Flaubert had reached an early crossroads in his pursuit of a literary career when he wrote these lines. His first version of L’Éducation sentimentale (1845) was a failure; at the insistence of Louis Bouilhet and du Camp he had abandoned his first version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1849); he set out on an 18-month-long trip with du Camp through Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Italy; after returning to Rouen in June 1851, he subsequently began writing Madame Bovary (1857). Soon after this 1852 exchange with Maxime du Camp, Louis Bouilhet would replace du Camp as Flaubert's most trusted critic / advisor. In the letter from which Mansfield copied, Flaubert details his feelings toward du Camp's advice that he play the role of a public man of letters in Paris, publishing in periodicals, making professional connections, and remaining abreast of literary trends as du Camp was then doing. In characteristic disdain for that life, Flaubert retorts:

Behind Flaubert's ironic posturing – refusing to compromise his art by professionalising himself, yet opting to be a country bourgeois – he seems to claim he is happy to follow his own instincts and work as he is most comfortable, remaining patient enough, though frequently frustrated in the process of finding le mot juste, to discover what he is capable of producing.