How to maintain newlines in converted html

I am using this library to convert a Django HTML Email template that has been rendered to html to plaintext (So I dont have to keep a text version and an html version).

One problem I am encountering though is that I have some text that is injected into the html, coming from the db, and it already has whitespace and newlines that I want to maintain in it. Using html I am able to maintain these with white-space pre-wrap:

`

Using this library though, the newlines are completely stripped out and I just get one paragraph of text. Is there a way to maintain these newlines?