Jane Austen's peculiarity

[Richmond]

Jane Austen [amongst others] uses an interesting type of grammatical 
construction of this sort:

After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton to inquire if Mr. Wickham
_were returned_, and to lament over his absence from the Netherfield ball.

Pride and Prejudice.

I would like to analyse a million word corpus that I have been granted 
access to for this type of construction.

However, I don't want to find examples of only 'were returned', but all 
examples of

were + infinitive / preterite / past participle

and, presumably for that I shall have to use wildcards . . .

OR ???

Richmond.