I admit that when a character called Charlotte Staples Lewis turned up on the ABC television series "Lost" last year, I was excited. The puzzle-like show is full of literary references, planted here and there, to give its most cultish fans even more mysteries to investigate. A lot of them are red herrings.

Charlotte, who spent her early girlhood on the mysterious island where most of the action is set, was later exiled to the mainland and told by her mother that she'd imagined the whole...