HTML formatting for Mailerlite?

Mailerlite formatting keeps doing things I don’t want it to do… and I don’t know if it’s because I’m bad with the program or it’s just limited in how it can format. (An example: I cannot for the life of me figure out how to italicize hyperlinked text, which is rather inconvenient when I’m trying to insert a link into a book title….)

Is there HTML formatting or some such that I could use for Mailerlite rather than the normal user interface? (I know very little about HTML coding, but am at the point that I would gladly learn it just for Mailerlite….)