Private pages not listed on blog

I’m using the default theme. I’ve created a private page, setting its page status to ‘Private’ and pressing the ‘Save’ button to save it. I presumed that, being logged in to WP as the creator of the page, the page would appear in the sidebar on the blog main page. But it doesn’t. It only seems to appear in the Manage | Pages section of the admin area. Did the creators of the private page feature intend it to behave differently to my expectations? Making it appear on the blog main page is consistent with the behaviour of private posts.