Yandere/Literature

Queen Dido in The Aeneid, making this trope Older Than Feudalism.
Going back in time and to actual literary canon, Catherine from Bronte's Wuthering Heights is something very close to this towards Heathcliff.
In Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None, Vera Elizabeth Claythorne looks like a sweet and pretty governess and teacher. In reality, she killed her pupil Cyril by letting him drown in the sea, so his uncle Hugo who also was her lover could inherit the kid's estate. As the plot advances and all the people around her fall like flies, dying in ways similar to those depicted by the "Ten Little Indians" nursery rhyme,Vera becomes more and more psychotic and crazy.
- Averted in the play. The uncle killed Cyril instead. As she isn't a murderess, Vera is allowed to live.
- In three of the English-speaking movie adaptations: she is accused of murdering her sister's finacee, but reveals towards the end that it was her sister who killed him. And in one adaptation,all that happened was a child dying in her care and there is no reference to her lover at all. Only the Russian version faithfully keeps her original crime and character.
- Agatha Christie seemed to be pretty fond of this trope for many of her female characters, mostly under the "deconstructing the Proper Lady and examining it more or less realistically" category, which was especially appropriate for the time period she wrote her novels in, when women were expected to be devoted to only their loved ones and have no other life of their own. This is deconstructed so very much. Vera would have to be her most prominent example because she not only deconstructs it; she stomps all over it and rips it completely to shreds.
In Roald Dahl's short story "Lamb to the Slaughter", Mary Maloney acts the perfect wife... until her husband announces that he's leaving her. She then lashes out with the frozen leg of lamb that was going to be that night's supper, killing him unintentionally. She is heartbroken, but as she is pregnant, she will not run the risk of being caught; she feeds the murder weapon to the police officers who come to investigate.
Elena from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant takes this trope to the next level by having a disturbing romantic obsession over her biological father. Thanks to her, I will never look at the word 'beloved' the same way again.
The Other Mother in Neil Gaiman's Coraline is a maternal (not romantic) example.
In Greg Keyes' Elder Scrolls Novel, The Infernal City, Slyr is so in love with Toel she attempts to Murder the Hypotenuse, who happens to be the protagonist. Naturally, things don't go according to plan, but she fits the trope to a T.
Hester Shaw from Phillip Reeve's Mortal Engines quartet. After she sees her boyfriend, Tom kissing Freya Rasmussen she betrays the city of Anchorage to Arkangel, just to get him back. She'd also do anything or kill anyone for him. Or to get him back.
The Lover in Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning...the poem can be interpreted in a number of different ways, but the main gist of it is that he kills her so that he can make the moment last forever, and the poem closes with him clutching her corpse. Eep.
The vampiress Claudia shows signs of being both this and a Tsundere for Louis. Besides her own anger, she's even willing to 'kill' Lestat so that they can be together. Of course, for certain reasons, she prefers to experience the physical side of the relationship vicariously.
Selene of the Wheel of Time. Also known as Lanfear, Mierin Eronaile, Cyndane, or the Daughter of the Night. She wants Rand al'Thor very badly, has no tolerance for any woman who so much as touches him, and gets very put out if he refuses her. It doesn't help that she is an extraordinarily powerful channeler and quite often kills underlings in the midst of her murderous rages.
Ktarka Zamlon Torin, in S.L. Viehl's Beyond Varallan, goes to incredible lengths to revenge herself upon the family of the guy who turned her down, despite the fact that they'd only just met and he was unaware of her feelings for him. And in the meanwhile, she hits on the heroine a few times. Hoo boy. (Although, to be absolutely fair, her culture didn't help matters: The moment she proposed to the guy, she was bound to him for life; and the fact that he was marrying someone else didn't change that.)
In Kier Neustaedter's short story "And Sáavüld Danced..." the title character, put in a situation much like the previous example, goes to similar lengths (albeit by making a deal with an Eldritch Abomination rather than by way of technology) to get revenge. However, she's treated far more sympathetically—a sort of tragic Anti-Villain Protagonist, as it were.
Kirsten seems like a sweet, meek girl bound in servitude to Bede, the Guardian of the Sister of the North, with love and a dark spell. Her sister, who also loves him, is mysteriously missing - it must all be Bede's fault, right? Wrong. Kirsten is the true Guardian, a Clingy Jealous Girl to the extreme who with dark magic enslaved Bede to be her cover. She also threatens him into following her orders by holding the fate of her trapped-in-a-locket-by-magic sister Mariette (who he truly loves) over his head. Aww, isn't that sad?
Her name's Christine, shitters.
- Language...
Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Tess, beginning when Angel initially rejects her (because she lost her virginity by getting raped in the past) and she offers to kill herself, among other things, if it restores his good name. At the end of the novel, results in Murder the Hypotenuse when Tess kills Alec, her rapist thus her sexual partner by Victorian standards, just to be with Angel. To be fair, she also committed the murder for herself after all the pain she endured.
Jin Yong: Ah Zi towards Xiao Feng fits this trope to a "T". She has the cute, innocent, Genki Girl looks... and the incredibly horrifying, sadistic personality. Guo Fu was also one towards Yang Guo. And then there's Zhou Zhiruo towards Zhang Wuji, among others.
Ryu Murakami's Audition. You know that movie by Takashi Miike? This is the book the movie is based on. And you better believe Asami Yamasaki is just as fucked up in the book as in the movie.
Tinkerbell. Yes, that Tinkerbell. She did not by any means like Wendy, she even tried to kill her. All because Peter paid more attention to her than Tink. Most adaptations keep the general clinginess but tone it down from "homicidal fury."
- Not necessarily, as the World Masterpiece Theater and even the Disney version do keep the scene where she arranged for Wendy to be shot by the Lost Boys, as well as how she betrays the kids to Hook in exchange for him taking Wendy away.
Annie Wilkes in Misery
In William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily, the eponymous Emily Grier fell in love with a man named Homer Barron. One day, he went in Emily's house and was never seen leaving. When Emily eventually passes away, her house is searched and it turns out she killed Homer with arsenic, dressed him in a suit, and kept the corpse on her bed.
More than one culprit that Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson deal with turns out to be a yandere, and they're almost Always Male. Rodger Baskerville Jr. aka Jack Stapleton from The Hound of the Baskervilles is a good example: he abuses his wife and forced accomplice Beryl like you wouldn't believe, but when he forces her to pose as his sister and become a Honey Trap to attract Sir Henry, he goes Crazy Jealous Guy when Henry courts Beryl directly.
- Also, Abe Slaney from The Adventure of the Dancing Men. He will do anything to force his ex-girlfriend Elsie Cubbitt (née Patrick) to return to the USA with him, going from harrassment and threats written in a sdecret code that only he and his victim can decipher at first (the mentioned "dancing men"), to shooting her Nice Guy husband Hilton dead when he confronts him.
- Jefferson Hope from A Study in Scarlet manages not only to be an Anti-Villain version of the trope (Enoch Drebber was the Complete Monster who forces Hope's girlfriend Lucy to marry him and drove her to a Death by Despair, and Joseph Stangerson was a Jerkass who aided him by killing Lucy's dad), but also a Magnificent Bastard since he dies peacefully right after being caught, not even being tried..
Darien from Wolfbreed. First off, he is a werewolf and when we first met him he already has an almost complete lack of morals along with a burning hatred of humanity. This partly stems from his Doomed Hometown, which he is responsible for by the way, Freudian Excuse. When he meets Maria, the first female werewolf he has seen since his all werewolf hometown bought it, he immediately falls in love with her only to find out she has been raised by humans, doesn't really know she is a werewolf, is a devout Christian as opposed to Darien's Flat Earth Atheist outlook and has already begun falling in love with with a man named Josef who is also falling in love with her. And to twist the knife a little deeper, Josef is a soldier in the army that wiped out Darien's hometown and killed his his family. Darien doesn't react too well to any of this.
The Lady of the Green Kirtle from The Chronicles of Narnia, who Brainwashed Rilian into loving her. Subverted in that this was all part of a plot to take over Narnia.
- Played straighter with Crown Prince Rabadash from The Horse And His Boy, willing to start a war with Archenland and Narnia without even the smallest excuse or challenge if it means he'll have Queen Susan the Gentle as his puppet-wife. He spectacularly fails.
Harry Potter:
- Romilda Vane sends Harry Cauldron Cakes tainted with Love Potion, which are then eaten by Ron, turning him into one over her.
- Helena Ravenclaw, the Ghost of Ravenclaw House, reveals she was also the victim of one, as she was killed by her lover the Bloody Baron.
- Bellatrix Lestrange toward Voldemort.
- And then there's Merope Gaunt, who actually succeeded in drugging the man she was Yandere for and eventually bearing his child - who will later grow up to become Voldemort.
Caelan, from the Skulduggery Pleasant series, is shaping up to be quite the Stalker with a Crush, and is starting to show signs of graduating to full blown Yandere.
- Oh he went there. Spectacularly. But not for long.
The Star Wars Expanded Universe gives us Abeloth. She's not Luke's ex-girlfriend, but she is. This evolves into full It's All About Me.
Antoinette de Mauban in The Prisoner of Zenda. A bit of an odd claim, but hear me out. She's in love with the King's brother Michael, who wants to usurp the throne. However, if Michael becomes King, he'll have to marry a princess, which Antoinette doesn't want. Note that there's no reason she can't stay as his mistress, she's in that role already, except that she wants to marry Michael, not share him. So, she does what any good Yandere would do: reveal Michael's plans to the one man who can stop them and tell him exactly how to break into the castle and free King Rudolf, all under the promise that Michael won't be killed. Of course, even though Rassendyll promised this, there's no telling what Rudolf might do to his brother. So in short, she ruins Michael's dream of becoming King, taking the chance that he could be exiled or accidently killed all because she couldn't stand having another woman having him.
A Song of Ice and Fire: Lysa Arryn. A man named Littlefinger used her affection to convince her to murder her husband Jon and help spark a civil war. And when she believes that her niece Sansa is seducing him away from her, she threatens to throw the girl off a mountain to her death. (And ends thrown off instead.).
- And bear in mind that said niece was thirteen years old and being sexually harrassed by Littlefinger, which would have been pretty clear to Lysa except, well...
- Littlefinger himself also qualifies to some extend, although he is more of the intelligent sort of crazy. Because every single thing he has done was either to discredit Ned Stark and have him taken away so he can romance his wife Catelyn (who also hapened to be Lysa's sister), or to get the affection and crowning as Queen of Catelyn and Ned's daughter... Sansa, the aforementioned niece.
Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame shows that males aren't immune, either.
"My Preciousss..."
Lydia towards Ethan in Peter Moore's Caught In The Act. BIG time.
In Death series: Indulgence In Death has a guy who killed a girl he was interested in a drunken fit of rage because she was not interested in him.
- Visions In Death has a Twist Ending in which the psychic who had been helping Eve solve the case only did it because she wanted to make her murder of Annalisa Sommers look like John Blue murdered her. She was trying to get her ex-boyfriend back, who had hooked up with Sommers. She claims that she did it for love, but Eve refutes that claim, saying that she did it for power and control, and that love is just an excuse!
In The Dummy by Diane Hoh, Jaye Bishop learns that her supposed friend Caroline has been simultaneously cheating with Jaye's boyfriend Maguire and trying to kill Jaye. This isn't the first time Caroline has gone after someone else's boyfriend. In high school she murdered a classmate to get her boyfriend, then broke up with him because they started dating a month after Caroline committed the murder. Caroline figured he wasn't admirable boyfriend material if he was able to get over his dead ex so quickly.
The Odyssey has Calypso who, after offering her lover Odysseus a chance to stay with her on her island forever, tries to force him to stay on her island with her after he rejects her and tries to get back to his wife at Ithica. She eventually lets him leave because Hermes told Calypso that Zeus said she had to let Odysseus go back to Ithica.
The Princess Bride: When Buttercup gives Prince Humperdink "The Reason You Suck" Speech, he throws her into her room. Then he races down to where her true love Wesley is being tortured, and sets the torture device on maximum, killing him. Clearly, the Prince did not take to being rejected by Buttercup well.