One goal of feminist art historians has been to expose the difficulties faced by women artists. Avoiding conventional female roles, demanding access to instruction, ignoring the ridicule of male colleagues, women artists have been seen as fighters against discrimination, as independents and rebels. The story of Harriet Hosmer, imbued as it is with determination, indifference to the opinions of others, and critical and financial success, has become a classic.

Encouraged by her father to pursue physical exercise after her mother and siblings died of tuberculosis, Hosmer had an active childhood in Massachusetts. Sent to a progressive school that fostered independence and provided her with creative female role models, she became determined to sculpt. On her way to achieving this goal, she studied human anatomy, a necessity for sculptors and a subject usually forbidden to women. She sailed for Rome in 1852 and gained entrance to the studio of the English sculptor John Gibson, where she attracted the patronage of affluent tourists.

Hosmer was not the only female sculptor in Rome at this time. She was one of a group of American women sculptors, dubbed the "White Marmorean Flock" by Henry James, who had gathered in Italy to seek artistic companionship, liberal working conditions, abundant examples of classical statuary, and access to skilled artisans and sources of marble.

Hosmer generally concentrated on dignified heroines of history and literature, but Puck provided a lucrative alternative. She produced over thirty replicas of her interpretation of this mischievous fairy known in folklore since the Middle Ages and made famous in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream. Buyers included England's Prince of Wales. The smooth white surface and the idealized form of the child reflect Hosmer's neoclassical bias, even in depicting such a fanciful subject.