RUNGSTED, Denmark -- It's almost as if "Out of Africa" author Karen Blixen walked out of her house just before you got there.
Blixen's Rungstedlund estate is a museum but not one of the solemn and lifeless sort. A grandfather clock ticks gently, fresh bouquets in the style that the late Blixen loved to make adorn the drawing room and the curtains hang as if they had just been straightened by a diligent maid.The study with Masai and Kikuyu tribe shields and spears on the wall where she wrote about her years in British East Africa is amost untouched. So is the Green Room where Blixen worked in the winter.
Her bedroom is closed off, as any proper hostess would do before receiving guests. Her housekeeper, Caroline Carlsen, still lives in a wing of the building.
The sense of it being a living residence is disturbed only by a few discreet signs for the tourists, who come in ever-increasing numbers since it opened in 1991.
More than 500,000 people -- half of them foreigners -- have visited the house which Blixen described as "a little more distinguished than a presbytery but not as distinguished as a manor."
Located 15.5 miles north of Copenhagen, the estate sits on the coastal road that leads to Louisiana, Denmark's leading museum of modern art, and farther on to the castle of Kronborg in Helsingoer, the home of William Shakespeare's fictitious prince Hamlet.
The home of Blixen, who also used the pen name Isak Dinesen, opened for visitors with great help from the film industry. And some people mistakenly believe it's the home of actress Meryl Streep because she played Blixen on the silver screen, said Tor Dinesen, Blixen's nephew.
Sydney Pollack's movie, "Out of Africa," which starred Streep and Robert Redford, boosted the sale of Blixen's books and won the Academy Award for best picture in 1985.
Blixen's name again hit the box office when an Oscar for best foreign film was given to Danish director Gabriel Axel for "Babette's Feast," based upon one of Blixen's short stories.
"We didn't make that much money out of the movies," said Dinesen, who heads the foundation running the museum. "We didn't think of (money) that way."
Although the foundation only got $100,000 from selling the rights to Pollack, his movie boosted the sale of Blixen's books worldwide. Sales in Europe multiplied and permitted the opening of the house -- where she was born in 1885 and died in 1962 -- as a museum.
The museum now ranks among the most visited in Denmark. Tourists staying in Copenhagen opt for an outing to Blixen's home rather than traveling 105 miles to the west to visit Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen's home in Odense, said Dinesen.
In 1914, Blixen married Swedish aristocrat Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, the same day she arrived in Mombassa in what now is Kenya. The couple had a coffee farm which eventually went bankrupt. Blixen contracted syphilis and made several trips to Denmark for medical checks. In 1931, she returned to Rungstedlund for good and began writing.