My short answer to you is that it makes a huge difference whether one is talking about male/male or female/female love, what class one was in, and which part of the Victorian Era this was taking part in. As I'm sure you know, Queen Victoria's reign covered more than 60 years and was a time of unprecedented economic, political, and social change in Britain. If you give me a year and place, I can be more specific. As a sweeping generalization, public response was much worse for men that for women, though both kinds of relationships were tolerated so long as they were kept quiet.

In medical texts, males who slept with other males were referred to as sodomites, Uranians (women in men's bodies), or as being "sexually inverted," all of which also overlapped with those who were transgender (there was little distinction made between the two by most medical texts, though some did distinguish between them). The public trial of author and celebrity Oscar Wilde in 1895 caused a media frenzy, and his sentencing and subsequent ruin is a chilling reminder of what could happen to someone in his position when found guilty of sodomy. It is important to remember, though, that Oscar Wilde wound up in front of a judge because he sued the father of his lover for libel (for calling him "posing somdomite" in a note), and the father, the Marquess of Queensberry, countered with a second trial for sodomy and indecency, for which Wilde was found guilty.

As has been very thoroughly discussed, there was a lively underground gay culture in Victorian England. Starting in the 1700s, men could meet like-minded men in what were called molly-houses, dress in what were considered women's clothes, and (especially starting in the late 18th century) hire male prostitutes. In another generalization, Victorian culture generally frowned on public expressions of male-male desire but looked the other way if it was coded, such as in the case of artwork depicting nude young men or literature hinting at male-male romance but not describing it specifically. It was very different for men actually caught having sex: public outcry was usually swift and caustic, and punishment could be brutal. Only from 1861 was sodomy no longer punishable by hanging in England, and sex between two men was only made legal in 1967.

But you asked about women, and that is another story. As Sharon Marcus shows in her book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), the intense expression of love and affection between women was encouraged by society, and women were invited to enjoy looking at the bodies of other women, even in sadistic/masochistic acts--adult women whipping younger girls was a popular topic in pornographic books for women. Reviewers of books that describe female-female desire often made horrified protests against characters they saw as "monstrous" and overcome by horrific sexual desire, but despite such printed protestations the lived reality was very different. Marcus suggests what was shocking to Victorians was not the female-female physical desire in itself but the idea of sexual desire outside of a stable relationship; excessive love of sex was considered deviant and dangerous, and the female desire for another female was thought to be a result of sexual desires overflowing their proper channels. Marcus describes women who exchanged rings and called themselves married. As Marcus writes, "Women who established longterm relationships with other women, by contrast, saw themselves, and were seen by others, as placid embodiments of the middle-class ideal of marriage: a bond defined by sex that also had the power to sanctify sex" (21). Friendship, love, and even physical desire were expressed freely in letters, and hand-holding and kissing were not considered shocking, but the norm for female friends. For two women to sleep in the same bed, even touching and kissing, was not in itself considered problematic, and was even encouraged. (In contrast, two men could sleep in the same bed, but should not touch. The horror at male-male love was connected with a general horror of masturbation. A hysteria about idle boys engaging in masturbation alone and together contributed to things such as the invention of the graham cracker and the founding of the Boy Scouts, but we can save that topic for another time.)

This is not to say that female-female love was embraced wholly by society. In 1810 (before the Victorian era, but telling), there was a trial with echoes of the Wilde trial almost a century later. Two Scottish schoolteachers, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, were reported by a pupil as having had sex in her bed while she was in it. The pupil's grandmother, Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, withdrew her girl and contacted the parents of the other pupils so that they, too, were removed. Pirie and Woods went to a judge to sue for libel, and though the judge ruled for them (partly because the judge refused to believe that two middle-class Christian women could do such a thing, and partly because the pupil in question, Jane Cumming, was a mixed-race illegitimate child, and the judge believed rather that she had learned of lesbianism from Indian culture), their careers were ruined. The trial was fictionalized as the play The Children's Hour. Medical texts described such "perverted" women as "Tribades" (women who had sex like men with enlarged clitorises) and Sapphists (from the Greek poet Sappho). They described "digitation" (manual stimulation) as one possible perversion. There was the belief that female masturbation could cause excessive sexual desire or sexual inversion. Some wrote that women sharing a bed together could lead to improper "excitation of desire," but it's important to separate moralist texts from general public perceptions. Contrary to the popular belief, Victorian medical texts describe that female sexual desire, arousal, and orgasm all very much exist.

The short answer to your question is that, if the relationship displayed is one that is stable and marriage-like, my research suggests it would have been accepted, though not embraced, so long as the sexual elements were kept discreet.

Further reading: Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr., eds. 1989. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library. Marcus, Sharon. 2007. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP. Rupp, Leila J. 2009. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women. New York: New York UP.