limitations on pending review

Simple version of the question: if I make a parent page Pending Review, but leave the visibility set to Public, does this make the page accessible to the general public? Or only to people with editorial access?

Long version:
our website is for a literary magazine. We have current and past issues visible to anyone who visits the site, with the navigation via menus and the search box. When we’re putting the new issue together, there are a whole load of different editors all creating pages, to be published when the print issue comes out. At the moment, everyone just saves things as drafts, and I have to go later and publish the pages, and add the links and nesting (parent>child>grandchild etc) in turn as the pages are published. What I’d like to be able to do is create the top level pages in advance, and have them set so that the other editors can link to them and set the parentage relationships as they go, without there being any risk of things becoming visible before they’re meant to. Can I do that? And if so, how?

Sorry if this has already been answered, but I couldn’t find a clear enough explanation.